50 Facts About William Gillette

William Hooker Gillette was an American actor-manager, playwright, and stage-manager in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

William Gillette is best remembered for portraying Sherlock Holmes on stage and in a 1916 silent film thought to be lost until it was rediscovered in 2014.

William Gillette assumed the role on stage more than 1,300 times over thirty years, starred in the silent motion picture based on his Holmes play, and voiced the character twice on radio.

William Gillette's first Civil War drama Held by the Enemy was a major step toward modern theater, in that it abandoned many of the crude devices of 19th-century melodrama and introduced realism into the sets, costumes, props, and sound effects.

William Gillette was born in Nook Farm, Hartford, Connecticut, a literary and intellectual center with residents such as Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Dudley Warner.

William Gillette's mother, Elisabeth Daggett Hooker, was a descendant of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the English-born Puritan leader who founded the town of Hartford and either wrote or inspired the first written constitution in history to form a government.

William Gillette was killed the morning after the surrender of the fort when the powder magazine exploded.

William Gillette briefly worked for a stock company in New Orleans and then returned to New England where, on Mark Twain's own recommendation, he debuted at the Globe Theater of Boston with Twain's stage-play The Gilded Age in 1875.

William Gillette irregularly attended classes at a few institutions, although he never completed their programs.

William Gillette died in 1888 from peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix.

William Gillette was hired as playwright, director, and actor for $50 per week in 1881, while performing at Cincinnati, by two of the Frohman brothers, Gustave and Daniel.

Early in his career, William Gillette realized that it would be in the triple role of playwright, director, and actor that he could make the most money.

William Gillette's composure is absolute and his mental grasp of a situation is complete.

William Gillette could mesmerize an audience simply by standing motionless and in complete silence, or by indulging in any one of his grand gestures or subtle mannerisms.

William Gillette did not gesture often but, when he did, it meant everything.

William Gillette would steal a scene with a mere nod, a shrug, a glance, a twitching of the fingers, a compression of his lips, or a hardening of his face.

William Gillette had a heightened sense of the dramatic, and his two most riveting scenes are still considered to be among the most dramatic scenes in the history of the American theater: the hospital scene in Held by the Enemy and the Telegraph Office scene in Secret Service.

William Gillette treated both sides of the American Civil War equally, bestowing integrity, loyalty, and honor on both North and South, even as he made a spy each play's sympathetic hero.

Men formerly had slammed halves of coconut shells on a slab of marble to simulate the sound, but William Gillette found this clumsy and unrealistic.

William Gillette's method consisted in "beating with clappers, that represent the hoofs of a horse, upon some material that serves to represent the road-bed over which the horse is supposed to be traveling" as well as "stamping, pawing, or jumping about in a restive manner while the rider is mounting, and then starting off, first at a trot, then a gallop, and finally a run, or at any gait desired, in any order".

William Gillette finally came fully out of retirement in October 1894 in Too Much Johnson, adapted from the French farce La Plantation Thomassin by Maurice Ordonneau.

William Gillette rewrote some of the script and starred in the play when it opened at the Garrick Theatre on October 5,1896.

William Gillette had finished his Holmes saga and killed him off in The Final Problem published in 1893.

William Gillette decided to take his character to the stage and wrote a play.

William Gillette then read the entire collection for the first time, outlining the piece in San Francisco while still touring in Secret Service.

William Gillette mainly utilized the plots "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Final Problem".

William Gillette portrayed Holmes as brave and open to express his feelings, which was substantially different from the intellectual-only original, "a machine rather than a man".

William Gillette wore the deerstalker cap on stage, which was originally featured in illustrations by Sidney Paget.

William Gillette introduced the curved or bent briar pipe instead of the straight pipe pictured by Strand Magazine illustrator Sidney Paget, most likely so that William Gillette could pronounce his lines more easily; a straight pipe can wiggle or fall when speaking, or cause problems with declaring lines while it is clenched between the teeth.

William Gillette made use of a magnifying-glass, a violin, and a syringe, which all came from the Canon and which were all now established as "props" to the Sherlock Holmes character.

William Gillette formulated the complete phrase: "Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow", which was later reused by Clive Brook, the first spoken-cinema Holmes, as: "Elementary, my dear Watson", Holmes's best known line and one of the most famous expressions in the English language.

Postance went to the Palace Hotel where William Gillette was sound asleep, and awakened him at 3:30 in the morning to break the bad news.

Conan Doyle and William Gillette had never met, so Conan Doyle's shock was understandable, once the two finally arranged a meeting, when the train carrying William Gillette came to a halt and Sherlock Holmes himself stepped onto the platform instead of the actor, complete with deerstalker cap and gray ulster.

William Gillette applied all his dazzling special effects over the massive audience.

William Gillette toured nationally along the western United States from October 8,1900, until March 30,1901.

William Gillette was shown widely, through appearances in many editions of the Sherlock Holmes canon and in magazines by way of photographs or illustrations, and was well represented on the covers of theater programs.

William Gillette was the model for pictures by the artist Frederic Dorr Steele, which were featured in Collier's Weekly then and reproduced by American media.

Steele contributed to Conan Doyle's book-covers, later doing marketing when William Gillette made his farewell performances.

In 1907 William Gillette was caricatured in Vanity Fair by Sir Leslie Ward, and later became the subject of such famous American caricaturists as Pamela Colman Smith, Ralph Barton and Al Freuh.

William Gillette had no children and, after he died, his will stated:.

In 1972, a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and other memorabilia related to William Gillette were donated to the State of Connecticut by Doreen Carlos-Perkins, daughter of Louise Rutter, an actress who worked with William Gillette on Broadway.

William Gillette announced his retirement many times throughout his career, despite not actually accomplishing this until his death.

In 1929, at the age of 76, William Gillette started the farewell tour of Sherlock Holmes, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

William Gillette received a Signature book, autographed by 60 different world eminences.

William Gillette died on April 29,1937, aged 83, in Hartford, due to a pulmonary hemorrhage.

William Gillette was buried in the Hooker family plot at Riverside Cemetery, Farmington, Connecticut, next to his wife.

William Gillette wrote 13 original plays, 7 adaptations and some collaborations, encompassing farce, melodrama and novel adaption.

In 1891, after first visiting Tryon, North Carolina, William Gillette began building his bungalow, which he later enlarged into a house.

William Gillette named it Thousand Pines and it is privately owned today.

On December 7,1934, William Gillette attended the first dinner meeting of The Baker Street Irregulars in New York.