Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,418

This is the grave of William Gillette.

Born in 1853 in Hartford, Connecticut, Gillette grew up as part of the elite of that city in a time when actually was elite, when Mark Twain lived there, before it became exactly as exciting as you’d think a city based around the insurance industry would be. His father Francis was briefly in the Senate when William was a toddler. But rather than follow his father’s path toward politics, Gillette decided to become an actor. His father was horrified. But here was the thing–Francis had already lost his others sons, one to tuberculosis out in California and one to the Civil War. He didn’t want to disown his last one. So he gave him a stipend and tried to maintain relations with his annoying son. In fact, when his father was dying in 1878, Gillette left the stage in order to take care of him for a year.

Now, with his father dead, Gillette inherited most of the money so he wasn’t quite the struggling actor that a lot of actors were. But he was struggling in the sense of having success and that would continue really for quite some time. It wasn’t until 1881 that his career began to turn around. The Frohman Brothers, who were big Broadway theater owners, saw something in Gillette and hired him to write, produce, and star in a play in Cincinnati. See if he could make it in the boondocks. Well, he did. The play he produced went gangbusters, hit the road, and soon, he became one of the biggest theater people in America. Of course, his acting is what people knew him for, but he continued to write and produce primarily because he could make more money that way. He was noted for being completely unable to emote, which was a problem sometimes in 19th century theater, but rather he could bring great seriousness to a role, which was often unusual in those melodramatic days. He was also seen as a master of silence, using facial expressions and timing to create a mood. He also became the owner of several patents on improving stage sound effects, although how one meaningfully patents a new sound to represent a horse galloping, which is not an invention per se but rather a new technique that requires no new material, is not something I quite gather. It’s more an early version of intellectual property I guess. But this is more than a little out of my wheelhouse.

Anyway, Gillette took a break in the late 1880s, only working occasionally. He retired and unretired more than George Foreman. But his plays were big in England too and so the temptation was strong to go over there. So in 1887, Charles Frohman convinced him to go to London to put on his play Held by the Enemy, which was one of his many Civil War based plays. Now, Gillette was not the first actor to have success in the UK. We’ve just talked about John Howard Payne, for instance. But what made Gillette different is that he was the first American actor to put on his own play that was about a specifically American theme and take the London stage by storm. After all, up until this time, the U.S. was seen as a cultural backwater in Europe, and mostly for good reason if we are being honest with ourselves here. Gillette disposed of all the melodrama bullshit common in the theater and embraced a hard realism, at least for the time. Audiences loved it, on both sides of the pond.

Perhaps Gillette’s most famous play is Too Much Johnson, from 1894, which remains in theater rotation at times. Gillette continued to write and produce plays for years. But this is not why he is most known today. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle realized he made a huge mistake by killing off his Sherlock Holmes character. The mistake was not literary, it’s that Doyle needed money and he killed his cash cow. So he began to write a new Holmes play with stories that took place earlier in time. Well, it eventually got to Gillette, who agreed to do it if he could rework it some. Needing the cash, Doyle was cool with that. Gillette did and he became the first iconic Holmes actor. Gillette threw out all of Doyle’s characters except for Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty and rewrote it all. Gillette introduced the curved pipe to the character and wrote the line “Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow.”

Well, Gillette toured in England on the play and then brought it to the U.S. in 1899. Then it was back to England, where King Edward VII got his own performance in 1902. Gillette did still work up his own plays from time to time but this was a cash dream that no actor could pass up. Most of the rest of his life was dedicated to staging and playing Holmes. He even wrote a parody of the play for a few benefit performances that happened to cast the very young Charlie Chaplin in a small role.

Gillette also played Holmes in the 1916 silent film version. I actually haven’t seen it, but it was considered lost for a long time, was rediscovered, and remastered in about 2015. Here it is:

So Gillette was now super rich. He did what a lot of rich guys of this era did–build himself a ridiculous house. In this case, it was an actual castle, which still exists today in Connecticut, where he lived when he wasn’t on the road. He also designed his own train that was 3 miles long going around his property. He really liked trains. Gillette’s last time playing Holmes was in 1929. At that performance, Calvin Coolidge showed up (evidently there was something old sourpuss enjoyed), as did Booth Tarkington and many other famous people. He did occasionally still act, all the way until almost the end, with his last stage performance taking place in 1936. He died in 1937, at the age of 83. For a man who lived in an actual castle, quite.a modest stone to remember him.

At least as late as 1977, Gillette’s play Secret Service was staged with John Lithgow and Meryl Streep.

William Gillette is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Farmington, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other Americans associated with Sherlock Holmes, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. He’s such a British character that few Americans have played him since (though Robert Downey, Jr. is an obvious recent exception). But there is a 1922 version where the accents weren’t required, so John Barrymore, who played Holmes naturally, is in East Los Angeles and Carol Dempster, who played Alice Faulkner, is in Glendale, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.