He was natural Philip St. John Basil Rathbone within Johannesburg, South Africa, a son of Edgar Philip Rathbone and Anna Barbara George. His immature sister & brother were Beatrice Rathbone & John Rathbone.

Rathbone was married to actress Marion Foreman (married 1914-divorced 1926) and writer Ouida Bergere (married 1927-his death 1967).

He & Foreman got a single boy, Rodion Rathbone, & he and Bergere got 1 adoptive girl, Cynthia Rathbone.

He died of the heart attack at his zero in New York City. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York.

His career
In a period of the 1920s, Rathbone appeared in Shakespearean roles on the British stage. He was around two or three silent movies, and played detective Philo Vance in the 1929 movie The Bishop Murder Case.

Rathbone became noted for swimming suave villains within several harum-scarum of the 1930s, including David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), Captain Blood (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Mark of Zorro (1940).

He was virtually all notable for his starring roles around xv Sherlock Holmes movies. To numbers of fans, Basil Rathbone was natural to play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous London detective. He too starred when Holmes sustaining Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in an old-time radio mystery series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939-1946), and did numerous other radio broadcasts.

He was admired for his athletic cinema swordsmanship, particularly around the duel on the beach in Captain Blood & when Sir Guy of Guisborne within the long fight scene in Robin Hood. More noteworthy blade fights pop up in The Mark of Zorro & The Court Jester (1956). the latter duplicates the scene around the previous in which Rathbone slices a candle in two and leaves it burning.

Basil Rathbone earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936), and a second nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance of King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938).

It was inside 1939 that Rathbone first starred when Sherlock Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Regrettably, a numerous sequels typecast him (he gained a nickname 'Razzle Bathrobe') & he wwhen unable to break away from a stereotype, except withwithin certain put-on of his earliest swaggering villains in such film as ''Casanova's Big Night (1954) and The Court Jester (1956).

Rathbone likewise acted in Broadway numerous times. Inside 1948, he won a Tony Award for Best Actor inside Play for his performance of Dr. Austin Sloper in the original production of The Inheritrix''.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to appear around many anthology software online in television.

He is too known for his readings of the stories & verse form of Edgar Allan Poe, which are collected together using readings by Vincent Price.

Basil Rathbone has troika stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; a single for motion pictures at 6549 Hollywood Boulevard; of these for radio at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard; & one for television at 6915 Hollywood Boulevard around Hollywood.