David Burke, actor who was Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes and a noted theatrical prankster

David Burke, the actor, who has died aged 91, played Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes on television in the 1980s; he also boasted a reputation as the British theatre’s most ingenious practical joker.

As Watson in Granada Television’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), Burke proved the ideal stolid foil to Brett’s mercurial, furniture-leaping detective. The producer Michael Cox, who cast Burke, praised his ability to play the role as “the ordinary middle-class man in the street”, albeit with “a degree of charm and intelligence and wit, as well as the flair for getting on with the ladies which Holmes, of course, said was ‘Your department, Watson’.”

Burke, a seasoned Shakespearean much admired for his commanding stage presence, admitted that initially he “had reservations about playing a man who had serious claims to be the most ordinary character in English literature”. But when he voiced his doubts to his wife, the actress Anna Calder-Marshall, “she turned to me with genuine puzzlement and said, ‘What’s your problem? It’s you to a tee!’”

Indeed, Burke found Watson one of the easiest parts of his career: “I needed to change only clothes. My mind stayed exactly where it was.”

The series has come to be regarded as the definitive screen adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales, and Burke was praised for restoring Watson to his original status as capable helpmeet, rather than the Colonel Blimp-ish comic bungler played by Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone films of the 1940s and much imitated thereafter. The Daily Telegraph’s Seán Day-Lewisjudged Burke to have “just the right degree of puzzled doggedness, never falling into the kind of silly ass stupidity which the short-suffering Sherlock would never have stood”.

Burke was proud that he and Brett did justice to “one of the great male friendships – on a par with Hamlet and Horatio, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. At the end of the second series, after Holmes had apparently plunged to his death in the Reichenbach Falls while grappling with Professor Moriarty (Eric Porter), Burke’s Watson faced the camera and movingly delivered the famous lines: “I shall ever regard him as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”

But although Brett’s Holmes would be resurrected in the next series, Burke did not return with him: he had decided that he was spending too much time filming in Manchester away from his wife and their small son. Burke recommended his friend Edward Hardwicke to take over the role of Watson in the series, which would continue until shortly before Brett’s death in 1995.

Brett, who thought that he and Burke made “a very good odd couple”, found his departure “absolutely devastating”, but noted: “I was so proud of him for going back to his son. There would be more happy marriages if fathers went back to their children.” Burke did admit later on, however, that he had also been “getting bored of saying, ‘Good heavens, Holmes!’”

Burke also won acclaim for his stage career, a highlight being his Othello opposite Michael Kitchen’s Iago at the Old Vic in 1975. In 1998-99 he played the physicist Niels Bohr in more than 500 performances of Michael Frayn’s cerebral stage hit Copenhagen: “His incarnation of Bohr’s celebrated combination of percipience and innocence, of toughness and lovability, moved me deeply,” Frayn later recalled.

This was generous praise, as Burke had enlivened the play’s run by masterminding a hoax that Frayn had fallen for, hook, line and sinker. Burke had begun by writing a letter supposedly from a Mrs Celia Rhys-Evans, enclosing a page from a cache of German documents she had unearthed relating to the internment of Werner Heisenberg (another character in Frayn’s play) at Farm Hall in Godmanchester after the Second World War.

Burke, who had “aged” the forged documents by giving them a five-minute spell in his tumble drier, had thought that the letter and enclosed papers (which included cod-scientific diagrams) would be clearly recognisable as a spoof, but to his amazement Frayn took “Celia” at her word.

A long correspondence ensued. Burke became ever more wild in his inventions, with Celia sending Frayn extracts from a terrible novel she had written about events at Farm Hall, and demanding money in exchange for more documents.

The letters were originally written out by Burke’s sister, but after she tired of the hoax Burke typed them, with “Celia” explaining that she had sprained her wrist opening a tin of cat food. Frayn, to his later shame, swallowed every unlikely detail, telling all his friends about the astonishing documents he was receiving through the post.

Eventually, Matthew Marsh, who played Heisenberg in the play, took pity on Frayn and told him that Burke was responsible. Frayn responded by forging a letter to Celia from the MOD threatening prosecution for appropriating classified documents.

Only at the dinner to celebrate Burke’s final performance in Copenhagen did Frayn confront him. They agreed to collaborate on a book, Celia’s Secret (2000), told from the alternating perspectives of hoaxer and victim. Last month the book was adapted by Martin Jarvis as a BBC radio play, starring Alex Jennings as Frayn and Roger Allam as Burke.

Burke admitted to a long history of spoofing his colleagues in the theatre. In 1968 he wrote to Paul Scofield in the persona of a Sergeant Blenkinsop of the Railway Police, summoning him to Haywards Heath police station for pulling the communication cord on a train.

When the actor Clive Russell had a treasured hat stolen, Burke could not resist buying an identical hat and sending it to Russell with a letter supposedly from the thief, who had planned to add it to his collection of 234 stolen hats “in a special room in my ranch in Texas”, but had repented after seeing Russell on stage in a Gorky play: “You speak and reveal that your fictitious father is a singer. So was my real father. That he was a drunkard. So was mine! And finally that his name was Terenty Krifantovich Teterev. My father’s name precisely.” Russell believed in the letter entirely until Burke owned up a year later.

Trying to explain why he kept “indulging in the kind of prank that anyone else might have got out of his system before his 15th birthday,” Burke observed: “I suspect that I have been trying to make up for a rather solemn childhood. I was a swot. I believe I still project a grave presence. It comes in useful in the acting. But it means I don’t get offered the comedy that I adore.”

David Patrick George Burke was born into an Irish Catholic family in Liverpool on May 25 1934. His parents – Patrick Burke, a ship’s steward, and his wife Mary, whose four sisters were all nuns – were both from Co Cork.

Reading classics on a scholarship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, David acted on stage for the first time: “Just a couple of lines, but they got a gale of laughter. I walked around in a daze afterwards, knowing that I had found what I wanted to do with my life.”

When he told his mother he wanted to be an actor, “she stopped dead in the street, looked up to heaven and just kept repeating: ‘No, no, no.’ One of her sisters gave up sweets for a year as penance. I think she hoped that would somehow balance the books with God.”

He spent many years with the National Theatre Company, and the Royal Lyceum Company in Scotland, where he met Anna Calder-Marshall; they married in 1971, and frequently acted together on stage, creating the roles of Geoffrey and Eva in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular in 1973.

Their son, Tom Burke, went on to become a leading actor as the star of Strike and Legends. He told the Telegraph in 2016 that his parents had taught him how to avoid “microwave acting – bringing out the same box of tricks again and again for effect”.

Tom Burke’s godfather was Alan Rickman, whose friendship with his father had inevitably begun with a prank, while they were touring Germany in Measure for Measure. “Alan didn’t have a great experience at some hotel in Munich, so he stole a spoon,” Tom Burke recalled. “After they got back, my dad… phoned him up pretending to be from the German embassy in London, following up on a report of some missing cutlery. Alan totally fell for it.”

David Burke’s other notable stage roles included the Earl of Kent to Ian Holm’s King Lear and John of Gaunt to Ralph Fiennes’s Richard II. He was involved in a famous theatrical disaster at the National in 1989 when playing the Ghost to Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hamlet: an emotionally exhausted Day-Lewis hallucinated his late father in Burke’s place, and fled the stage. “We found him backstage on the floor, sobbing his eyes out,” Burke recalled; Day-Lewis never acted on stage again.​

On television, Burke played Stalin in the period espionage drama Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983) and also appeared in The Avengers, Z Cars, Coronation Street, Poirot, Spooks, Midsomer Murders and The Musketeers. His films included The Woman in Black (2012).

His wife and son survive him.

David Burke, born May 25 1934, died May 10 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]