In the Billy Wilder-directed film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), which starred Robert Stephens as Sherlock, Mycroft was played by Christopher Lee (who also played Sherlock Holmes in other productions before and since). In this film, which purports to show the 'real' people behind Watson's dramatised accounts, Mycroft is nearly unrecognisable: whippet-thin and not notably indolent. He is also depicted as either the head or at least a senior operative of the British secret service, for which the Diogenes Club is a front.
Charles Gray assumed the character in both the 1976 film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and four episodes of Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gray's first two television appearances were adaptations of the two stories in which Mycroft actually appears (The Greek Interpreter and The Bruce-Partington Plans). In the two other appearances, the character was used to replace another for various reasons:
The Golden Pince-Nez – Mycroft was used in place of Watson due to Edward Hardwicke being unavailable.
The Mazarin Stone – Mycroft was used in place of Sherlock owing to Jeremy Brett's ill health.
The 1975 film The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, starring Gene Wilder as Holmes' younger brother "Sigerson Holmes," was inspired by Mycroft, who is mentioned, but does not appear except in a photograph of the three brothers as children.
He is also briefly mentioned in the 1985 film, Young Sherlock Holmes; when Sherlock is expelled from boarding school, he tells Watson that he plans to stay at his brother Mycroft's for a few days.
Richard E. Grant played him as a semi-crippled young man – following a bad trip after he was injected with drugs by Moriarty – in Sherlock: Case of Evil (2002).
Mark Gatiss plays Mycroft in the 2010 BBC television series Sherlock of which he is the co-creator. In this contemporary version, Sherlock and Mycroft exhibit smouldering animosity toward each other (which Dr. Watson characterises as "sibling rivalry" and Mycroft himself refers to as a "childish feud"). Mycroft is part of the Cabinet Office and is so powerful that he can use mass surveillance to track Sherlock. In keeping with the books, Mycroft describes himself as "occupying a small position in the British government", but more accurately, "he is the British government". While Sherlock reveals that Mycroft essentially bullied him as a child and has made him feel stupid throughout his life, going so far as to suggest that they would both be willing to arrange the death of the other, Mycroft gradually reveals a well-hidden deep familial love for his brother, something Sherlock, in time, begins to reciprocate. In the 2015 Christmas Special "The Abominable Bride", he is portrayed by Gatiss in heavy makeup as morbidly obese, more in keeping with the original stories.
Rhys Ifans played Mycroft Holmes in another modern adaptation, Elementary.[4] In this series, Mycroft is introduced as a London restaurateur who later turns out to work for MI6 as a source due to his restaurants being used as a front for various crime organisations. Mycroft goes into hiding at the end of the second season when he exposed his ties to MI6 to help Sherlock with a case, which Holmes feels reflected a lack of trust in him to find another solution. In the sixth season episode "Nobody Lives Forever", it is revealed that Mycroft died ten months prior to the events of that episode of a brain haemorrhage, which Sherlock was never informed about until he started digging.
In the NHK puppetry Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft is a fat young man who is in the sixth grade of Beeton School. He is in the position of managing the pupils of Dealer house in which he lives, the head of the pupil council and member of Diogenes Club in his house. Though he has deductive powers superior to Sherlock, he is more calculating than his younger brother.
In the 2015 film Mr. Holmes, set in 1947, though it is revealed that Mycroft died a year or so earlier, he appears briefly, played by John Sessions.
In the Japanese television series, Miss Sherlock, which premiered in 2018, Yukiyoshi Ozawa plays Kento Futaba, who is modeled on Mycroft. He is the older brother of Yuko Takeuchi's Sherlock, who respects his intelligence, and he holds a prominent position in the government's Intelligence Agency.
