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.
