Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  It didn’t take long for me to find out.

  Chapter 2

  ‘We must never, ever, laugh at him’

  Back in London, the one thing that was preoccupying me was still Poirot’s voice. I had to get it right. It wasn’t a joke, it wasn’t there for anyone to laugh at; it was at the very heart of the man. But how could I find it?

  To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories.

  I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious.

  After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat.

  The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot. I vowed to myself that I would never allow him to be a figure of fun. He may have been vain, but he was a serious man, just as I was, and I wanted to bring that out.

  That was when I started to realise that perhaps he and I had more things in common than I’d suspected. We were both outsiders to some extent – he a Belgian living in England, me a Londoner who was born in Paddington but nevertheless had always somehow felt something of an outsider. That was not the only quality we shared, however. I had exactly the same appetite for order, method and symmetry that he did. And, like Poirot, I was not prepared to compromise what I believed in. That certainly applied to his clothes.

  After I got back from Bryher, I was shown some of the proposed costumes for the television series. But they weren’t quite right. In my eyes, they didn’t represent the image of the man that I had formed after reading the books and making my own notes. They were too loud, too garish. They had more to do with a comedy programme than the character I wanted to play, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want my Poirot to look foolish.

  Sadly, the moustaches I was offered were almost as wrong: far too big, drowning my face, so that I looked like a walrus – quite horrible. I hardly knew what to say. I was terribly disappointed, but it made me all the more determined. I was not going to be put off. Everything I’d been shown had nothing to do with the Poirot I wanted to portray, and I was not going to allow him to be made a fool of.

  With Brian Eastman’s help, it was agreed that I would be ‘permitted’ to wear the clothes that Agatha Christie herself had dictated that Poirot should wear – a three-piece suit, a wing collar, shiny patent leather shoes and spats. There were one or two people working on preparing the series that weren’t too keen. ‘They will look so dull on television; they aren’t interesting enough,’ they said. But I dug my heels in.

  If Agatha Christie said that Poirot would wear a morning jacket, striped trousers and a grey waistcoat at certain times of the day, then that was exactly what I wanted him to wear on television – not a jot more, nor a jot less. After all number twenty-two in my list of characteristics said: ‘Very particular over his appearance,’ while number twenty-four added: ‘Always wears a separate collar – wing collar,’ and number thirty-three explained: ‘His appearance (including hair) is always immaculate. His nails groomed and shined.’

  My Poirot would always be dressed like that or I wouldn’t play him.

  I felt exactly the same way about his moustache. I didn’t want it to look like something stuck on, a silly afterthought. It was central to the man he was, a reflection of his fastidious attitude to life. There was never a single moment when Poirot wasn’t enormously particular about it. As my note number twenty-one said firmly: ‘Will always take his solid-silver moustache-grooming set with him when travelling.’

  That was why Brian Eastman and I, together with a make-up artist, decided to design the moustache that I would wear for the television series ourselves, rather than to accept the suggestions we’d had so far. And we based our moustache on the description that Agatha Christie herself gave in Murder on the Orient Express, the full-length story that she wrote in 1933 and published the following year.

  As she herself was to say, almost forty years later – when the film version starring Albert Finney appeared – ‘I wrote that he had the finest moustache in England – and he didn’t in the film. I thought that a pity. Why shouldn’t he have the best moustache?’ I was determined to serve my writer, and I certainly wasn’t going to allow my Poirot not to have the finest moustache in England.

  In the end, Brian and I came up with a moustache that we both thought exactly conveyed what Dame Agatha had in mind – a small, neat, carefully waxed one that curled upwards, and where the tip of each of end would be level with the tip of my nose. For us, it was the best-looking waxed moustache in England, and exactly what Hercule Poirot must have.

  With those decisions behind me, I found myself at Twickenham Film Studios on the south-western outskirts of London, not far from the River Thames, in late June 1988, climbing carefully into the outfit that would define my portrait of Poirot. It was my first screen test.

  First came the padding. I needed to wear a good deal on my stomach, chest, back and shoulders, to make sure I was the right shape. I’m actually fairly slim, but it was vital that Poirot shouldn’t be. The padding helped me gain almost 40 pounds in appearance, transforming me into a man who weighed more than 200 pounds. Even the separate wing collar that gripped my neck like a vice helped to make my face look a little fatter.

  After the padding came the clothes, and I insisted that the striped trousers be immaculately creased, the black morning coat freshly pressed, the grey waistcoat a perfect fit and the white shirt sparkling for the screen test. Then my dresser added the little brooch of a vase containing a tiny posy of flowers for my buttonhole. All that was left was the moustache we’d taken such trouble with. It was put in place by the first of many make-up ladies I have had over the years. The moustache was always put on in the make-up truck or dressing room after I had put on my costume. There would always be two – when one wore out, we would have another one made, as a spare.

  All that was necessary now was for the wardrobe mistress to brush Poirot’s hat very carefully. I gently reminded her that number forty-six in my list of characteristics said that he would ‘always brush his hat “tenderly” before leaving his flat’. Finally, I reminded myself of number forty-eight: ‘Can’t abide being or feeling untidy. A speck of dirt on his clothes is “as painful as a bullet wound”.’ There wasn’t a speck to be seen anywhere.

  Walking onto the sound stage for a set of still photographs and a full video screen test, I allowed myself to think – just for a moment – that Agatha Christie herself might just feel a touch of pride at the look of the man who was walking out to face the cameras that morning. Feeling quietly confident, I walked up and down, bowed, doffed my hat and smiled a little warily into the camera. I wasn’t sure that I had quite mastered Poirot’s distinctive, thin smile quite yet.

  Pride cometh before a fall: there was something else that I most certainly hadn’t mastered – Poirot’s walk.

  When Brian Eastman and I sat down to look at the screen test that afternoon, we realised that I simply didn’t move as we both knew the great man would have done. My stride seemed too big a
nd too certain. My Poirot should walk like a dancer – poised and graceful, always on the balls of his feet. Instead he was walking as though he were playing Iago – manly, dramatic and anything but fastidious.

  Horrified, I left Twickenham in a panic and drove home on the verge of despair. How was I going to find his walk? I had no idea. I was absolutely at a loss. But then I remembered that Agatha Christie herself had once described it. The only question was where? I started going through her stories one by one, desperate to locate her description, and – quite by chance – I stumbled upon it.

  These were his creator’s words: ‘Poirot crossed the lawn, with his rapid mincing steps, his feet painfully enclosed within his patent leather shoes.’

  His feet hurt, that was part of the secret, and the other part was that he ‘minced’. At last I understood, but the question was – how could I create that particular walk?

  Then I remembered a famous Laurence Olivier story explaining how he’d managed to walk like a ‘fop’ in a Restoration comedy. ‘I put a penny between the cheeks of my bum, old boy,’ he’d said, ‘and try to keep it there. If I can manage to do that, then I can produce the mincing walk I need to play the role.’

  Without a moment’s hesitation, I went out to walk round and round my garden with a penny between the cheeks of my bottom – except I used a small, modern, post-decimal penny. Larry had used a big old-fashioned one.

  I practised walking for hours, stopping, turning and bowing – all with the penny clenched between my buttocks. It fell out a good many times at the start, but then, gradually, it began to stay in for longer and longer, so much so that I forgot it was there. My stride shortened, I came up on the balls of my feet, and all the time I kept imagining that my feet hurt, trapped in those painful patent leather shoes.

  Finally, I rang Brian Eastman and suggested a second screen test. Back we went to Twickenham, where I got back into full costume and make-up – with the moustache, of course – and into those tight, shiny shoes. Then I went in front of the cameras.

  It worked. At last we knew that we now had our Poirot, walk and all.

  The only thing left for me to do was to go and find a book of Edwardian manners. After all, if one of Poirot’s major cases when he was still in the Belgian police was the Abercrombie forgery case in 1904 – as Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard reveals in The Mysterious Affair at Styles – then he would most certainly have been aware of the delicacies of Edwardian Europe. He would have gradually confirmed his own manners at the end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, as a man in his middle age. That’s when they would have been formed, and they would have remained with him ever since.

  I wanted to know the precise details of how an Edwardian gentleman would greet a lady; how to tip one’s hat; how to walk with a cane; how to hold one’s gloves; whether to take them off, and when; how to bow and to whom, and when; how to take a lady’s hand and kiss it; how to sense a silence and not break it.

  There aren’t many men today who could cope with a Homburg hat, white gloves and a silver-topped cane without dropping one or all of them. I knew in my very soul that Poirot would never, ever, have allowed himself to make such a mistake.

  And as the days passed in that summer of 1988, another thought struck me – I was beginning to see ever more clearly the parallels between Poirot and me.

  As my list of characteristics pointed out, at number sixty-five, he ‘will usually wear a morning suit when working at home – like a Harley Street specialist’. That struck a chord, for my own father had done the same in his rooms at Number 2, Harley Street, while treating his private patients as a gynaecologist and obstetrician.

  I too liked things to be symmetrical around me. If I put two things on the mantelpiece, they have to be exactly evenly spaced, though I’m not quite as fanatical as Poirot. I also think people find it easy to talk to me, as they do to him. ‘Women find him very sympathetic,’ my note number seventy-five said. My brother John insists that I was always attracting the pretty girls when we were young men, while he wasn’t, though I don’t honestly remember that. But, like Poirot, I would admit that I have a ‘twinkle’ in my eye when it comes to ladies. I think my wife would agree with that, because I twinkled at her. As for my baldness, there was a similarity there too. I lost a great deal of my hair when I was just twenty-three, after a love affair collapsed. I was heartbroken, and so was my hair. Perhaps the same thing happened to Poirot – who, according to number sixty-seven of my notes: ‘Once fell in love with an English girl who used to cook him fluffy omelettes.’ He would have liked to have been married, and – as my note number eighty-nine reminded me – ‘Genuinely believes that the happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world.’

  It was almost as if Poirot and I had started to become one – though perhaps I had been a little luckier in love.

  Quite by chance, Sheila and I were looking to buy a new house in the months before I started filming. The children were growing ever more active, and we wanted somewhere in the suburbs, rather than in the crowds of central London, for them to grow up in.

  One house we looked at, Elmdene in Pinner, was owned by the late, great comic actor Ronnie Barker – and when we arrived, we both agreed that it looked exactly like a house in an Agatha Christie story. There were leaded lights in the windows, an Art Deco front door and reception rooms, even a garden large enough for all the suspects to assemble for Poirot’s final revelation of the murder.

  Even more extraordinary, when I went into the dining room to talk to Ronnie about the house and the possibility of buying it, above the mantelpiece, there was an oil painting of him dressed in character.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Ronnie.

  ‘Oh, that’s me as Hercule Poirot,’ he said with a little smile. ‘I played him in Black Coffee in rep. I wasn’t very good.’

  Perhaps inevitably, Sheila and I ended up buying the house – we knew that Poirot would have approved of it.

  Poirot was suddenly everywhere I turned, peeking from the next room, reminding me – and challenging me – to bring him truthfully to life on the screen.

  Then, just a couple of weeks before shooting was about to start, I was invited to lunch by Dame Agatha’s daughter Rosalind Hicks and her lawyer husband Anthony, who I knew looked after the Christie affairs around the world.

  We went to a small Italian restaurant just off Kensington High Street with glass-panelled walls and ferns, which made it all feel very light and airy. I sat down thinking that it was going to be a happy, congratulatory lunch, though I was also distinctly nervous, as this was the first time I’d met Dame Agatha’s only child, who was then almost seventy.

  What I didn’t realise, as we sat down, was that I was about to be as grilled as the sole I ordered for lunch. The whole meal was taken up with Rosalind and Anthony asking me to clarify exactly what my intentions were towards Poirot. How was I going to play him? What did I have in mind for his voice and walk? How was I going to deal with his little idiosyncrasies?

  The room may have been airy, but the atmosphere was rather less so. Then, towards the end of the meal, Anthony Hicks leant across the table towards me and looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘I want you to remember’, he said, a touch fiercely, ‘that we, the audience, can and will smile with Poirot.’

  Then he paused.

  ‘But we must never, ever, laugh at him.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘And I am most certainly not joking.’

  I gulped, before Rosalind said, equally forcefully, ‘And that is why we want you to play him.’

  With those words ringing in my ears, I knew that I had to be 100 per cent in character from the very first day of filming, and that I had to project Poirot’s behaviour precisely as Dame Agatha had described it in her books from the first moment the cameras turned, because the character I was committing to celluloid would be fixed forever.

  I also knew that this was one of the mo
st important days of my life.

  Chapter 3

  ‘I’M SORRY, BUT I AM NOT GOING TO WEAR THAT SUIT’

  It was just before 6.30 a.m. on a bright, sunny morning in late June 1988 when Sheila and I walked out of our new home on my first day of shooting for the first series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot for ITV – the day that I knew could well be the most important in my life.

  We’d finally bought Ronnie Barker’s house in Pinner, Middlesex, not far from the church, and we’d moved in on Midsummer’s Day, but we weren’t quite settled – there were still boxes everywhere. Most frightening of all, neither of us knew whether we would actually be able to afford to stay there.

  On the doorstep, Sheila and I turned to each other and said, almost in unison, ‘We’ll be very happy if we manage to stay here for a year.’ It was such a special house for us, way beyond our dreams.

  As I walked towards the car that the producers had arranged to collect me, I said, with a smile on my face, ‘If we don’t get another series, we sell.’

  Sheila laughed as I climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door. Driving away, I looked back through the rear window to see her waving. My heart was in my mouth, and our house was on the line.

  But there was some comfort on that summer Monday morning, because I was in good hands. The man driving me across London to Twickenham Studios was a friend, and, though I didn’t know it then, a man that I was destined to spend the next twenty-five years sitting beside as we drove all over England.

  How he came into my life is a rather lovely story. A couple of years earlier, just after I’d come back to England from filming Harry and the Hendersons in America, where I had played the ‘Bigfoot’ hunter Jacques Lafleur, who was determined to kill the giant animal that John Lithgow and his family wanted to save, I’d been offered a part in a play called This Story of Yours at the Hampstead Theatre Club.