The producer June Wyndham Davies, who has died aged 97, took over the reins from Michael Cox to steer Granada Television’s acclaimed Sherlock Holmes adaptations on ITV through the 1980s and 90s. She regarded Jeremy Brett, who played Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective, as “an idiosyncratic but quite definitive Holmes”, and critics around the world agreed.
Cox launched The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85) with a mission to return the stories to the look and tone of the originals published in the Strand magazine. Brett brought a darker side to his portrayal of Holmes compared with previous screen versions, displaying mood swings and a cocaine addiction, and Granada built a Baker Street set at its Manchester studios.
After two series, Davies stepped in to produce The Return of Sherlock Holmes, with Cox overseeing the dramas as executive producer. Her first task was to absorb Edward Hardwicke into the cast as Dr Watson when David Burke left the role to take up an offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In terms of the production, she aimed to make the programmes as visual as possible. “The big plus was that all around Manchester, into Cheshire and surrounds, there are some of the most wonderful mansions you could ever find and some of the best scenery,” she told Helen Cohen and Baptiste Marcel in a 1996 interview.
Nevertheless, the film crew travelled further afield for the 1988 feature-length special The Hound of the Baskervilles, although not to the novel’s Dartmoor setting. Baskerville Hall was shot, instead, in Staffordshire. “Dartmoor is boring,” Davies said. “We had to look for more spectacular places to film.”
As local locations were eventually exhausted, long trips were more common, but they could be problematic. For a 1993 special, shot in the Cotswolds, Davies explained: “We changed the title from The Sussex Vampyre to The Last Vampyre because we couldn’t find anywhere in Sussex that was suitable for filming.” The distinctive look of the Cotswolds made the title change imperative, she added.
The task of producing The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1986-88), The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1991-93) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994), as well as five specials, was constantly challenging as Davies faced ever-tighter budgets and a lack of action in some of the stories, which meant inventing scenes and straying a little from the original intention of being faithful to the Holmes canon.
She also had to manage the difficulties surrounding Brett’s deteriorating health – he had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The Mazarin Stone (1994), the penultimate in Granada’s 41 Sherlock Holmes dramas, had to be rewritten after the star was hospitalised and unavailable for filming. Charles Gray stepped in as Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, to solve the case.
Of Brett, Davies recalled: “He was kind, loving, demonstrative … [but] when his depression was upon him he was a different person entirely … he would become aggressive and not want to continue.”
Davies was born in Cardiff, to Despina Wyndham, a ballerina, and Mervyn Davies, an army officer, and educated at Elm Tree House school, before going into rep in 1950 as an assistant stage manager and actor at the Little theatre, Bristol.
She moved on to the Theatre Royal, Horsham, where her roles included Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights (1953), with Michael Caine as her brother Hindley. In another production, he played a suitor trying to get her drunk. “I spent the entire scene without taking the cork from the bottle, so she had to get drunk on empty glasses,” Caine recalled.
Davies also appeared at the Theatre Royal, Margate (1957-60), and had a few one-off roles on television, including two parts in the glossy magazine soap Compact (in 1963 and 1964).
After experience as the general manager, then director of productions, with the Arthur Brough Players at the Leas Pavilion, Folkestone (1962-65), she joined the BBC as an assistant floor manager in 1965. As a director, she then worked on episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre (1966) and Boy Meets Girl (1967) before going freelance.
She had successes with Kate (1970-72), starring Phyllis Calvert as an agony aunt, and the Sunday-teatime family serials Pollyanna (1973) and Heidi (1974), which was nominated for a Daytime Emmy award in the US.
Davies’s long association with Granada Television included directing 47 episodes of Coronation Street (between 1973 and 1981) and 15 of Crown Court (from 1973 to 1977).
As a producer, she made Send in the Girls (1978), a series about the Personality Promotions events team, a group of young women led by a former musician used to life on the road (played by Annie Ross). Writers such as Fay Weldon, Brian Glover and David Nobbs scripted the stories.
This was followed by the pilot Waxwork (1979), another Victorian detective drama, and the resulting series Cribb (1980-81), starring Alan Dobie and based on Peter Lovesey’s novels about a working-class detective in London during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders.
Then came Shades of Darkness (1983-86), a ghost story anthology. Davies had previously both produced and directed Willis Hall’s original ghost story Christmas Spirits (1981), starring Elaine Stritch.
For Granada Films, she later produced August (1996), transplanting Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya from Russia to Wales, with Anthony Hopkins both starring and directing. It won the Bafta Cymru best English-language drama award.
Her last screen work, for Prince Edward’s Ardent Productions, returned to Victorian London. The TV movie The Cater Street Hangman (1998), an adaptation of Anne Perry’s novel, featured a feisty aristocrat (Keeley Hawes) teaming up with a Scotland Yard detective (Eoin McCarthy) to hunt for a serial killer.
In 2006, three years after moving to Spain, to a village in Alicante, Davies married the actor Norma West, her partner since 1962. Norma survives her.
• June Mary Despina Wyndham Davies, producer, director and actor, born 27 June 1929; died 9 September 2026
