Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady

Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady and its sequel, Incident at Victoria Falls, are a pair of TV films made in 1991 under the banner Sherlock Holmes the Golden Years. Harry Alan Towers was executive producer and Bob Shayne was the writer on both.

Plot

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are elderly gentlemen in 1910 Vienna. Both are involved independently with foiling Balkan terrorists. They reunite by chance with “The Woman”: actress Irene Adler. They save Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria from an assassination at the opera house and thus delay the onset of World War I.
The film also featured a number of historical characters, including Eliot Ness and Sigmund Freud.

Cast

Christopher Lee as Sherlock Holmes
Patrick Macnee as Dr. Watson
Morgan Fairchild as Irene Adler
John Bennett as Dr. Sigmund Freud
Engelbert Humperdinck as Eberhardt Bohm
Tom Lahm as Eliot Ness
Jenny Quayle as Lady Violet Cholmondley
Jerome Willis as Mycroft Holmes
Margaret John as Mrs. Hudson
Charlotte Attenborough as Margaret Froelich

Production

It was initially announced that there would be an eight-hour miniseries entitled The Golden Years of Sherlock Holmes. The project series of eight one-hour episodes soon morphed into two three-hour films.

Filming

It was shot back to back with Incident at Victoria Falls.

Locations

Filming locations were in Austria, London and Luxembourg.

Home media

Both were released in the next two years and there were drastically edited versions released by Vestron Videos. The full versions are now available on DVD.