"Jeremy [Brett] was an actor. He was an actor who shone because he was dangerously real. His performances were seldom comfortable -- but then real life is seldom comfortable. For...Jeremy [Brett's] real home was the theatre. It was here where his flame burned its brightest, its warmest, its fiercest, its truest..." --David Stuart Davies, author of Bending the Willow
Nine of the following images were extracted from Carrie Pratt's Jeremy Brett WebSite and five were extracted from Goodness Gracious. However, good thanks to Midden who personally scanned and relayed four images from her references. Also to Mia Stampe of Denmark for contributing a charming photograph from Aren't We All?; great thank yous to Louise who has personally scanned and relayed eleven exquisite images all the way from Sweden; plus informing me of one photograph extracted from Corbis Pictures! Also graditude to The Redheaded League for contributing one other photograph! Again more thank yous to Linda Pritchard are sending two remarkably rare photographs, including one from his Central School rôle!
Last 
on 06 January 2000
Point of Departure (1952-1954?)
A trainee production by London's Central School of Speech and Drama, though holding a guitar-like instrument, Jeremy's exact rôle is unknown.
Saint Joan (1955? or 1963?)
I lost my caption-reference after my computer crash, so I'm uncertain if this is Jeremy's 1955 or 1963 rôle(s) in Saint Joan. If any Brettian can confirm which production, please consult the editor.
Troilus and Cressida (1956)
Jeremy won Most Promising Actor for his rôle as Patroclus in 1956.EDITOR'S NOTE: See that rather dashing macho-man, Achilles (don in a striped cloak), in the centre of the second picture? And on the left of the third picture? That is a 29-year-young Charles Gray, who twenty-nine years later would star opposite of Jeremy as Sherlock Holmes' older brother, Mycroft!
Romeo and Juliet (1956)
Meet Me By Moonlight (1957)
Variation on a Theme (1958)
Playing opposite of the great Margaret Leighton, Jeremy played the rôle of "Ron," a ballet dancer who affects a French accent, and, according to a reviewer, "has no hips and no morals."
Marigold (1959)
The Edwardians (1959)
Johnny the Priest (1960)
The Changeling (1961)
Hamlet (1961)
"I couldn't believe the circumstances [of the story]...I thought they were so monsterous, and I was very rough on my 'mother,' I think. I mean physically rough. I think, yes, I was angry at the time -- my mother had been killed savagely in a car accident in 1959, and I was very angry about that because my son [David], when she was killed, was only three-months-old. And I was -- there was anger -- it was interesting -- there was anger in me. And I think that came through. I felt cheated -- I felt my mother had been cheated -- the rage of that came through..."Hamlet remains one of his favourite rôles.
The Kitchen (August 1961)
"Mr Jeremy Brett['s] tragic Peter," posts The London Times, "is played with an intelligence and sincerity that overrides his hardly consistent search for a German accent..."Jeremy put on two stones and chopped his hair for a rôle which remains one of his favourites.
The Workhouse Donkey (1963)
Jeremy plays Maurice Sweetman, the one with the cute bunny on his lap.
The Deputy (1964)
The production was a post-World War II play and a dangerous one at that, charging that the Pope Pius XII knew about the Nazi slaughter of innocent Jews and did not speak out against it! Howard Tubman of the New York Times wrote, "Now that 'The Duputy', which has stirred Europe for the past, is here, the debate, already begun, will be intensified. Our theatre rarely touches on moral issues of this magnitiude. For this is a play about choice. Every man, no less than the Pope, must make choices, and the avoidence of choosing is an act of choice itself. 'The Deputy' poses a unverisal problem in a sensational way..."On opening night, 26 Feburary, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic laymen (plus a group of neo-Nazis) picketed the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, chanting protest slogans so loudly it could be heard inside. Police were forced to barricaded off traffic around the theatre for twenty minutes before the curtain. The cast used ID badges in order to enter; the manager recommended the audience not to go outside during the intermission. The production sparked critical and theological controversy around the world! Fortunately, despite the great tension, no violence erupted, usually the protesters left before the play ended (which was eight hours), but the cast, for saftey's sake, did not take the customary bows at the end.
As You Like It (1967)
Jeremy's started his long-delayed National Theatre debut in a very controversial Shakesphearean production, due to fact that all the women in the play were portrayed by men; unsurprisingly, it became one of the most memorable productions done. In this, Jeremy work with some of the Britian's great "theatre knights" such as Derek Jacobi, Charles Kay, Anthony Hopkins, and Robert Stephens ("my best friend in England...")."Mr [Ronald] Pickup's Rosalind," posts The London Times, "a beaky long-legged figure in a yachting suit, does conform to Kott's specification of the boy-girl -- except that it is completely non-erotic. It begins demurely with a few well obversed feminine geatures, and takes on character only during the Gangmede scenes. It is a blank that comes to life under the stress of intense platonic feeling; and there is real excitement in seeing this Rosalind and Jeremy Brett's very masculine Orlando being taking unawares by serious emotion in the midst of their game..."
Tartuffe (1967)
Love's Labour's Lost (1968)
Produced and directed by Lord Laurence Olivier, who Jeremy referred to as "my Great God", his mentor gave Jeremy a little card before opening curtain: "Darling, These are the do's and don'ts of acting: Do's: Think. Keep your neck back. Think. Be frank. Think. Perceive. Think. Listen. Think. Be in love with Joan [Plowright, who played the heroine]. Blaze. The Don'ts: Ingratiating. Soft. Adorable. Glamorous. Earnest. Polite. Decorated. Gablesome. Love wishes. Love gratitude. Love admiration. Love from Larry." Jeremy treasured this very card his entire life.
The Merchant of Venice (1970)
This theatrical production was later filmed and broadcasted on television in 1973.
A Voyage 'Round My Father (1971)
"I learned from [Alec Guinness, who played 'The Father'] how disciplined you have to be to sustain a rôle...He's also very human. He does not like the audience. If someone coughs, he sends his man with cough drops to Row J, Seat 5. Once, on a rare hot day, someone in the front row was using the program as a fan. Guinness knocked it out of his hand with a cane. Totally destroyed the illusion of blindness..!"
Rosmersholm (1973)
Design for Living (1973)
"[Joan Wilson, an American television executive in Boston] saw me on stage [in Design for Living] and said, 'That's the man for me'. She organised the meeting and we married in 1976. We had a decade together...I loved her dearly, she was so beautiful and gusty."
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1976)
Dracula (1978-1979)
"This is 1978, and what's a little blood between friends...""That scene amazes me. Here a man in a black cape comes in the window with a blast of mist and he seduced a girl on the bed, and there isn't a laugh or a titter in the place. I think it affects women terribly. To be swept off their feet, to be possessed, is their wildest dream. Men get an enormous fizz from it, too...He's a very sad creature, actually...I think he's very lonely and very old. He'd deeply sexually corrupted. Sex is obviously his main preoccupation. He's hooked. He's addicted. It's terrible to be hooked on anything, and he's hooked on blood..."
Set designs and costumes of the production were created by Edward Gorey, the artist who also did the opening animation to the MYSTERY! series. Amazingly, despite the uniform critical praise, Gorey disliked the production. "I tend not to like any of my work," he told The New York Post. "It wasn't a labour of love. I did it purely for the money."
The editor presents these photographs -- (1) the grand opening curtain and (2) the full-set stage -- to adorn the mood of the production which Jeremy broke box-office records in three cities -- Los Angeles, San Franisco, and Chicago. As Walter Kerr described the Gorey effect in The New York Times: "The certain rises not on a room but on a cartoon, a massive two-dimensional pen-and-ink sketch carrying us upward like a beehive tomb at Mycenae; and everywhere in its intricate stokes lurk the outline of bats' wings: bat' wings worked into the cornices and pediments, bats' wings worked into the upholstered blue-gray furniture. When the heroine Lucy comes on, dancing to an ancient radio and sipping from the blood-red contents of her wineglass, we discover -- as she extends her arms -- that her gown drapes into bats' wings, too..."
The Crucifer of Blood (1980-1981)
"Watson is much more my kind of person...Watson is warm, loving, sunny person who's very enthusiastic -- and hurt and slightly upset when his friend is rude to people or him. This is much more like me...[Playing Watson] was tremendous fun, and it taught me a lot about how to approach Holmes when the Granada series got under way. I learned a great deal about the inter-relation between the two men..."Jeremy won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Choice Award for Best Actor in a Play.
The Tempest (1982)
Jeremy starred as Prospero at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, he also directed the production!
Aren't We All? (1985)
"I based Willie [Tatham] on my father. He was Henry William Huggins, a famous solider in World War I. I dedicated my performance to my father. I even have his medals..." **shows four tarnished treasures proudly to the interviewer**"The reason I did Aren't We All? was to be with [Joanie, my wife]. I knew during the year of The Final Problem in '84 that she had cancer, and the lights really went out in my life. I didn't want to do it anymore. I didn't see the point...I lost her on 4 July 1985 and I went back to England when the play finished. It didn't finish until the 23rd -- I didn't know how I did those performances..."
The Secret of Sherlock Holmes (1988-1990)
The following five photographs were taken by Keith Harding and are purchasible in an assortment of sizes at Goodness Gracious.
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