> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Younger Daughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, on How the Actor Jeremy Brett Came to Meet Her:
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/mladshaia-doch-pisatelia-sera-artura-konan-doila-dama-dzhein-konan-doil-rasskazyvala-kak-akter-dzheremi-bret-prishel-k-nei-znakomitsia/
- Published: 2025-01-04T07:35:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:31:33.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Cinema, Books, London, Observations, Humour

> “He was charming. He was the only actor who played Sherlock Holmes who bothered to get in touch with me and come to see me. All this time he would ring me up and ask my opinion. He took criticism very well and never tried to justify himself.”

Jean Conan Doyle lived until 1997, by which time hundreds of adaptations of her father's works had been made, and it would be surprising if she had kept track of the acting in all of them.

But I found myself wondering about something. Why should an actor ask the children of a deceased writer for their opinion of his performance? The very fact of making the acquaintance of such a lady is certainly interesting, but ought the opinion of an author's child to influence the acting in an adaptation? Unless something of the kind is specially stipulated in connection with the copyright, what expertise in drama and the actor's craft can be expected of an elderly lady who devoted her life to military service and happened to be a man of letters' daughter? We might suppose that Sir Arthur left one of his children some special recommendations or advice for the event that, in the distant future, long after his death, someone should suddenly ask: “Was I any good?” But that is hardly likely.

So, with all due respect to years and to services rendered, an author's children, wives, secretaries, agents, close friends and chief admirers are still not the author himself, and cannot, trading on their position as persons somehow connected with him, lay claim by default to categorical expertise in his work.

Still, Dame Jean was at the very least warmly involved in the life of her father's works and well acquainted with the material, unlike, say, the descendants of some writer who do not consider it necessary to read his collected works. I think she really could have given sound advice, being, at any rate, a person who had mastered all the volumes of the adventures of Holmes and Watson, citing some detail or other. But that all the actors who played Sherlock in her lifetime did not turn up at her table readings was in fact a blessing for her: what a thoroughfare that would have been. She was wrong to complain of it.

On the whole, though, I often observe how descendants cannot separate themselves from the image of their famous forebears and so live out their lives trying to fit their laurels to their own brows. I remember how, before my very eyes, the daughter of a certain science-fiction writer, seeing her father's book on a second-hand stall, opened it, signed it with his name and, with great satisfaction, put the book back. She had left an autograph! A forged one, admittedly.

To return to Conan Doyle himself, according to the historian Lucy Worsley, Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated Sherlock Holmes and blamed his success for the unpopularity of his serious historical novels, and perhaps he would even have been glad of the very worst performance of the role.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_14796@04-01-2025_10-35-20.jpg)