My favorite Holmes':
- Jeremy Brett
- Basil Rathbone
Honorable mentions: Christopher Plummer, Johnny Lee Miller
Favorite Watsons':
- Martin Freeman
- Edward Hardwicke
Honorable mention: Lucy Liu, David Burke
Nigel Bruce's Watson is too much of the bumbler to be credible for me. Miller and Liu stories only loosely use the characters and only wave at the Doyle canon, but they are well done all the same
Favorite Watsons
1, Jude Law
2 Martin Freeeman
3 Ben Kingsley
Honorable Mentions Gareth David Lloyd from the Asylum "Sherlock Holmes". His Watson was the best thing in a other wise bad movie and I would like to see him in a movie with a far better script .
Least favorite Nigel Bruce , but I still hold by my statement that Bruce was better as Watson on the OTR show . Since he was the Narrator , he came off as far more intelligent then he did in the movies.
2 Dudley Moore,
3 Robert Duvall
And as with the Holmes choices, I not saying any of these are bad actors ,just bad as Dr Watson.
The jokes don't work in the Cook/Moore version of Hounds and There something about Duvall that does not work in Seven Per Cent Solution .
Also I don't hate any of the actors who played Watson , in the same way that I dislike some that have played Holmes.
You mentioned Johnny Lee Miller , I like the show Elementary and I enjoy the character he was playing but there were times, that I did not think of that character as Holmes. You could have named the Character some thing else and the show would not have lost anything.
That partially due to the scripts .
How ever the show had one of the best supporting cast of any show I seen in recent years . You could have and I think they did remove Miller's Holmes for some episodes and the stories still worked .