David Burke, the theater veteran who portrayed Dr. Watson alongside Jeremy Brett on the acclaimed 1984-85 ITV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, died May 10, his agent announced. He was 91.
On the stage, Burke starred in the original 1973-74 production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular at the Criterion Theatre in London, and for the National Theatre, he starred as Daniel Day-Lewis’ ghostly father in Hamlet in 1989, as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in 1998 and as the Earl of Kent opposite Ian Holm in King Lear, also in 1998.
In an interview with the Times of London, Burke recalled when Day-Lewis apparently mistook the ghost for his own father. “As the ghost disappears, I said, ‘Farewell, farewell, remember me,’ then when I looked back, Dan had gone,” he recalled. “We found him backstage on the floor, sobbing his eyes out.”
Burke appeared on all 13 episodes of Granada Television’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.” He performed the part not as a bumbler (as Nigel Bruce had done alongside Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes films of the 1930s and ’40s) but as a competent collaborator.
However, Burke decided not to continue as Watson — “I was getting bored of saying, ‘Good heavens, Holmes!’” he noted — and was replaced by Edward Hardwicke, who took on the sidekick role in subsequent series and telefilms through 1994’s The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
The son of a ship steward, David Patrick George Burke was born in Liverpool on May 25, 1934. He won a scholarship to Oxford and was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After graduating, Burke worked with Peter O’Toole at the Bristol Old Vic and met his future wife, actress Anna Calder-Marshall, when both were performing in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the Edinburgh Lyceum. (Brian Cox helped the couple get together.)
In 1963, he appeared on episodes of The Avengers, Z Cars and Coronation Street and two years later appeared as the playboy thief Sir George Burnwell in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” an episode of the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes, starring Douglas Wilker as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Watson.
Burke called Brett “a delightful man. He was a great perfectionist. I mean, he carried his book of Sherlock Holmes stories around with him, almost like a bible … Not merely did he keep a very close eye on the dialogue remaining faithful, but also, when we were actually filming, he would concern himself, in the nicest possible way, with making sure everybody was dressed correctly and that the action mirrored what it said in the book.”
Burke also played Joseph Stalin opposite Sam Neill on the 1983 miniseries Reilly, Ace of Spies and appeared on the series Crown Court, Poirot and The House of Eliott and in the 2012 film adaptation of The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe.
In addition to his wife, survivors include his son, Tom Burke, also an actor (the BBC’s Strike, Netflix’s Legends). The late Alan Rickman was his godfather.
