Rathbone frequently portrayed suave villains or morally ambiguous characters, such as Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield (1935), Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and Sir Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

[citation needed] The Rathbones fled to Britain when Basil was three years old after his father was accused by the Boers of being a spy following the Jameson Raid.

[4] On 22 April 1911, Rathbone made his first appearance on stage at the Theatre Royal, Ipswich, Suffolk, as Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew, with his cousin Sir Frank Benson's No.

In October 1912, he went to the United States with Benson's company, playing roles such as Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Silvius in As You Like It.

[5] Rathbone was a two-time British Army Fencing Champion; a skill that served him well in the movies, it allowed him to teach swordsmanship to actors Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power.

Rathbone was deeply affected by the news his younger brother John, a captain in the Dorsetshire Regiment, had been killed in action near Arras on 4 June 1918.

[7] He persuaded his superiors to allow him to scout enemy positions during daylight rather than at night, as was the usual practice to minimise the chance of detection.

[8] Rathbone wore a special camouflage suit that resembled a tree with a wreath of freshly plucked foliage on his head with burnt cork applied to his hands and face.

[9] As a result of these highly dangerous daylight reconnaissance missions in September 1918, he was awarded the Military Cross for "conspicuous daring and resource on patrol".

He began to travel and appeared at the Cort Theatre, New York, in October 1923 in a production of Molnár's play The Swan opposite Eva Le Gallienne, which made him a star on Broadway.

His sound debut was in the first screen adaptation of Frederick Lonsdale's play The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929) opposite Norma Shearer, which was his last appearance as a romantic leading man.

Like George Sanders and Vincent Price after him, Rathbone made a name for himself in the 1930s by playing suave villains in costume dramas and swashbucklers, including David Copperfield (1935) as the abusive stepfather Mr. Murdstone; Anna Karenina (1935) as her distant husband, Karenin; The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) as Pontius Pilate; Captain Blood (1935); A Tale of Two Cities (1935), as the Marquis St. Evremonde; The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) playing his best-remembered villain, Sir Guy of Gisbourne; The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938); and The Mark of Zorro (1940) as Captain Esteban Pasquale.

His character lost to Errol Flynn twice: in a duel on the beach in Captain Blood and in an elaborate fight sequence in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

In The Dawn Patrol (1938), he played one of his few heroic roles in the 1930s, as a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) squadron commander brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown by the strain and guilt of sending his battle-weary pilots off to near-certain death in the skies of 1915 France.

The first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (both produced by Fox in 1939), were set in the late Victorian times of the original stories.

The later instalments, produced by Universal, beginning with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), were set in contemporary times, with the first three having World War II-related plots.

In later years, Rathbone willingly made the Holmes association, as in a TV sketch with Milton Berle in the early 1950s, in which he donned the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape.

Nigel Bruce was slated to portray Dr Watson once more but became too ill and the part was played by character actor Jack Raine.

In the 1950s, Rathbone appeared in two spoofs of his earlier swashbuckling villains: Casanova's Big Night (1954) opposite Bob Hope and The Court Jester (1956) with Danny Kaye.

In 1948, he shared the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance as the unyielding Dr. Austin Sloper in the original production of The Heiress with Henry Fonda in Mister Roberts and Paul Kelly in Command Decision.

[15] Rathbone also made many other recordings, including Oliver Twist, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (with Leopold Stokowski conducting), and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

He recited poetry and Shakespeare, accented by reminiscences from his life and career (including the humorous, "I could have killed Errol Flynn any time I wanted to!").

As an encore, he recited "221B", a poem written by writer-critic Vincent Starrett, one of the preeminent members of the Baker Street Irregulars whom Rathbone held in high regard.

Rathbone appeared with Price in the final segment of Roger Corman's 1962 anthology film Tales of Terror, a loose dramatisation of Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".