Which actor played Sherlock Holmes in the 1976 film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution?

Nicol Williamson played Sherlock Holmes in the 1976 film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

The film adapts Nicholas Meyer’s 1974 novel, which imagines Dr Watson arranging treatment for Holmes’s cocaine addiction with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. It is not a direct adaptation of a single Doyle story, but it uses familiar canon characters and references.

Williamson’s Holmes is brilliant, volatile, and affected by his drug use. Alan Arkin played Freud, Robert Duvall played Watson, and Vanessa Redgrave played Lola Deveraux. The film combines detective fiction with historical fantasy by placing Holmes in contact with the founder of psychoanalysis.

The title refers to the cocaine solution Holmes is said to use in Doyle’s stories. The film’s premise expands a brief canonical detail into the central conflict of the narrative, while also inventing a new international case for Holmes and Watson.