by David Suchet
It was a harrowing piece by John Hopkins – who had cut his teeth writing Z Cars for BBC Television – about a burned-out detective sergeant who kills a suspected paedophile in police custody. Written in 1968, it had been turned into a film called The Offence in 1972 by Sean Connery, who had bought the rights and played the detective, and was directed by Sidney Lumet.
Detective Sergeant Johnson was such an important part that I didn’t want to miss any of the rehearsals, but about halfway through I caught the flu. Sheila and I were still living in Acton and it was a horrible battle to get across London to Hampstead by Tube, so we decided I should take a mini-cab – a rash decision really because we weren’t sure we could really afford it. But there was no other way I was going to get there, so we called our local firm, and a nice Irish driver turned up.
As we set off, he looked in the rear-view mirror and said, in a cheery Irish brogue, ‘You don’t look too good.’
‘I’ve got a bit of the flu,’ I told him.
‘Why are you going to work then?’
‘There’s no alternative. They can’t go on without me. I’ve got to be there.’
As the 45-minute drive went on, the driver told me that his name was Sean O’Connor and that he’d been working for the firm for a few years. He was charming, and I ended up telling him, ‘I wish I could afford to do this every day.’
Mightily relieved, I got to rehearsals and, at the end of the day – about 5.30 p.m. or so – I came out of the theatre, which is near Swiss Cottage Tube station in north London, bracing myself for what I knew would be a very unpleasant trip home on the Underground.
To my astonishment, Sean was outside waiting for me. He’d asked that morning what time I finished, but I hadn’t paid much attention.
‘I thought you’d need a ride home,’ he said, as he got out of the car and opened the back door for me.
Sean took me back to Acton, and didn’t charge me a penny. I couldn’t believe it, and, from then on, whenever we wanted a mini-cab, Sheila and I would ring our local firm and always ask for Sean.
When I was offered the first Poirot series a couple of years later, my contract allowed me to have a car to and from the studio every day of shooting, and so I asked whether I could choose the driver. The production office said yes, and I asked for Sean.
Funnily enough, when I first told him, he was driving me to what was then still the Comedy Theatre in the West End, this time for Tom Kempinski’s play Separation, because there was a bus and Tube strike in London that day.
‘Do you want to change your life?’ I said, as we struggled through the snarled traffic.
‘What do you mean?’
So I told him about Poirot, and that it meant I was allowed a driver of my choice.
There was barely a moment’s pause before he looked at me over his shoulder and said, ‘Not half.’
Sean has been with me ever since, and has become a well-known driver in the film and television industry in this country.
But when he’s driving me on Poirot, I always sit beside him in the front of the car – and there is a very specific reason why I do that. It goes to the heart of what I believe about being an actor. I always sit in the front because I never want to be perceived as a snob or a star. I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of being chauffeured, and never have, although I have to admit that there’s nothing that Poirot would have liked more. He would always sit in the back, quite happy at being chauffeured.
So it was Sean who ushered me across London on that June morning in 1988, the first day of filming. I sat there, feeling more nervous than I’d ever done in my entire career.
‘Am I going to do this right?’ I asked myself. ‘Will it work?’
Things did not start well.
Shortly after Sean dropped me outside my dressing room at Twickenham, just down the road from the River Thames at Richmond, my rather nervous male dresser arrived with the suit I was supposed to wear for the first day’s shooting.
It was for a scene in Poirot’s flat in Whitehaven Mansions, as part of the opening to the short story The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, which told of a missing cook, a mysterious lodger and the disappearance of £90,000 pounds in foreign bank notes from a bank in the City of London.
I’d looked at the scene in the car with Sean on my way to the studio, and could see it clearly in my mind.
One of the things I could see was that Poirot would be dressed in his black patent leather shoes, his spats, striped trousers and waistcoat as part of his morning suit. But those were not the clothes that arrived with my dresser on that June morning. Instead, I was presented with a distinctly dull, ordinary grey suit. I was horrified. All the fears that had welled up inside during the first costume fittings a few weeks earlier came flooding back, and I sat down in my chair with a bump.
‘I’m sorry, but I am not going to wear that suit,’ I said quietly. ‘It isn’t what Poirot would wear. He would wear his morning suit.’
‘But this is what I’ve been told to give you, David,’ my dresser told me, the surprise – and the nervousness – only too obvious in his voice.
‘Well, I won’t be wearing it.’
I will never forget the look he gave me when I said that. There was despair in his eyes, as well as a little confusion. Who was he going to please – the director or me? He was caught in the middle.
There was a long pause, and then he backed quietly out of my dressing room, with the grey suit over his arm. But I was as determined as I’d ever been that I was going to be true to the Poirot I saw in my mind’s eye and heard in my head.
In my heart, I knew that there was bound to be some reaction from the director, who had clearly decided that was what I should be wearing for the scene, but I wasn’t going to be put off. So, after my dresser came back to help me on with the padding I needed to play Poirot, I waited for another costume.
I didn’t have to wait long. Just a few minutes later, a costume lady arrived, this time carrying a morning suit, complete with striped trousers and waistcoat. My dresser took it from her. Hardly a word was said, but I was delighted that my views were being listened to.
Nevertheless, as I walked onto the set for my first scene, I was still trembling with nerves.
For the first shot, the camera was to track up from my feet, taking in my patent leather shoes, my spats and my striped trousers – I was to flick a speck of lint from them with my hand – and then rising to take in my waistcoat and bow tie, before arriving on my face, with my fingers stretched upwards in a steeple – the cathedral of hands, as I liked to call it.
Hastings was suggesting crimes that Poirot might be interested in from the newspaper, but Poirot carefully rejected all of them, before telling Hastings that he had to attend to his wardrobe. It was a little vignette of how very particular Poirot was about his clothes.
What was really terrifying me though was the simple fact that I knew that I had to be exactly right from the very first moment the camera caught sight of me, because once it did, I would never truly be able to change that first impression. I was still trembling when the director, the then 38-year-old Edward Bennett, who was to go on to work on many British television series, called, ‘Action!’
But my years in the theatre had taught me one thing that helped enormously: the ability to block everything out and concentrate. I knew that if I focused entirely on my Poirot, he would help me conquer my nerves.
To my immense relief, the fastidious little detective did exactly that. He saw me through my first day, and my second, and my third, just as he has on every single day ever since. More than anyone, it was Hercule Poirot himself who helped me to bring him to life on that first day at Twickenham.
Mind you, I had a lot of help, especially from my fellow actors in the core of the cast, including the wonderful Hugh Fraser as Poirot’s trusted friend and colleague Captain Hastings, Philip Jackson as Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Japp, and Pauline Moran as Poirot’s secretary, Miss Lemon. And then, of cour
se, there were Clive Exton’s superb scripts, adapted from Dame Agatha’s stories.
Clive was a Londoner, born in Islington, who had started his career writing for Armchair Theatre on ITV in 1959 and had gone on to write for both television and film, spending ten years in Hollywood before returning in 1986. He would end up writing no fewer than twenty Poirot scripts.
Funnily enough, there also turned out to be a strange echo of my time on Bryher in the Isles of Scilly that year, because the music for my first Poirot series was written by Christopher Gunning, the exceptionally talented composer who had also written the score for When the Whales Came. His Poirot music, including the delightful theme, was to win him a British Academy Film Award in 1989 for the best original television music. People still tend to hum it whenever they think about the series, and even hum it to me when they meet me.
In the first scene of The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, Poirot is refusing to take an interest in any of the crimes Hastings suggests because they are not crimes of ‘national importance’, as he puts it, rather grandly.
Poirot is brought down to earth with a bump when Miss Lemon ushers in a banker’s wife from Clapham, Mrs Todd, played by Brigit Forsyth, who wants him to find her missing cook, who disappeared just two days earlier. When Poirot tells her that this is too small a matter to concern him, Mrs Todd snaps back that he is just being ‘high and mighty’ and that a good cook is ‘very hard to find’ and ‘most important’.
To Hastings’ amazement, Poirot admits his error at once, and accepts the case, revealing two of his most endearing characteristics – his kindness and his ability not to take himself too seriously.
In fact, that first episode established a great deal about Poirot, not least the importance of his relationship with the ever-loyal Hastings. That was something that Hugh Fraser and I worked on throughout those first days of shooting.
Hugh had years of experience on the stage and on television, in everything from Edward and Mrs Simpson, in which he played Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and later to Sharpe where he was the Duke of Wellington. But though Hugh and I were almost exactly the same age, and he had studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, we had never actually worked together until that first day at Twickenham.
Yet we were destined to become forever intertwined in people’s minds, just as Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were after those twelve wonderful black and white Hollywood adventures of Sherlock Holmes between 1939 and 1946.
Hugh was born in London but brought up in the Midlands, and is married to the actress Belinda Lang. He became a tremendous support to me, someone I could rely on every bit as much as Poirot did on his Hastings, and I think I helped him too. But it was very difficult for us to work out exactly what our relationship should be on the screen. It meant that we had to be very aware about exactly where we stood or sat in relation to the camera. In the end, we decided that I should almost always be in the foreground and he slightly behind, unless the story dictated otherwise.
Quite rightly, Hugh didn’t want Hastings to be a comedy character – a straight man, if you like – because he thought, as I did, that his character was there to represent the audience in the story. That meant we had to find a way of making sure that Hastings was never allowed to look like a complete fool.
To help him with this, Hugh developed a dead-pan expression to convey to the audience that Hastings was someone who may not have been hugely intelligent but nevertheless represented the ordinary man. As Hugh put it himself at the time, ‘One of Hastings’ functions is to elucidate what is going on in Poirot’s mind.’
One way Hugh decided to do that was to use the phrases ‘Good heavens’ and ‘Good Lord’ regularly, as a gently ironic commentary on his attitude to Poirot. Was he truly amazed? Or was he actually making fun of the great detective? Whatever the truth, it was a wonderful device, and it worked.
The more upright and sensible Hastings became, the more it allowed me to accentuate Poirot’s foibles, the little mannerisms that I knew lay at the heart of his character. Hastings also gave me things to react against – like his love of his dark-green, open-top Lagonda car, for example, as well as his delight in the English countryside and sport, especially golf.
Both the car and the countryside of the Lake District play their parts in The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, where Poirot amply displays his dislike of the ‘wasteland’ of the country on a trip to Keswick, by stepping in a cow pat and complaining that there is not one restaurant, theatre or art gallery in sight.
It was Hugh who pointed out to me how much money was being lavished on the sets, props, costumes and background to make the production look authentic. We were walking across the Albert Bridge in Chelsea, on our way back from Mrs Todd’s house in Clapham, in a night scene, when Hugh said to me, when the cameras weren’t rolling, ‘Look, they’ve even got a camera crane. And have you seen how many vintage cars and passers-by dressed in exactly the right period clothes we have? It’s extraordinary.’
He was quite right, but it was the first time that I had really noticed it, because I’d been so caught up in my portrayal of Poirot. No sooner had he pointed it out, however, than I became even more nervous, as I knew that it meant that a very great deal of money and expectations were resting on my shoulders. Later on, I discovered that London Weekend Television, who financed that first series for Brian Eastman, spent almost £5 million on the filming of those first ten stories, an average of half a million pounds per episode, a fortune in 1988.
Our first story not only allowed me to introduce some of Poirot’s idiosyncrasies, it also allowed me to show his finest qualities. His kindness to Mrs Todd’s parlour maid, for example, which leads him to the Lake District and the missing cook’s ‘inheritance’ of an isolated cottage, his elaborate politeness to everyone he meets, and his habit of reading the Bible in bed every night.
The Adventure of the Clapham Cook also introduced one of the other principal characters in Poirot’s life, his friend and sometime foe, Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard, played by the superb Philip Jackson. Strangely enough, like Hugh, I’d never worked with Philip before those first days of shooting. Only three years younger than Hugh and me, he was born in Nottinghamshire and had studied German and Drama at Bristol University before going to Liverpool rep for eighteen months. Astonishingly flexible as an actor, Philip had then played in everything from the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine, to Dennis Potter’s acclaimed television drama Pennies from Heaven.
He had read Agatha Christie as a child, but he didn’t go back and read the stories again after being asked to play Chief Inspector Japp.
‘I chose to take the character from the scripts alone,’ Philip said at the time. ‘The challenge to an actor is to give the character a depth beyond what is printed on the page.’
What Philip did so well was to play what was essentially a comic policeman absolutely straight. There was no mugging for the camera from him, no raised eyebrows or comic winks. He just kept his trilby hat clasped to his chest and his eye on the man or woman he thought was guilty. Philip portrayed Japp as a down-to-earth, by-the-book copper who is unpretentious and almost child-like. He may have taken his cue from Inspector Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but he never once allowed himself to be made to look like an imbecile. If he were a little slower than Poirot, so be it, but he would never allow Japp to be humiliated.
On the set, Philip quickly realised what I was trying to do as Poirot, and reacted to it by being more and more ordinary in the face of Poirot’s idiosyncrasies, while all the time demonstrating his affection for the detective he spends so much time fencing with. As Philip puts it, ‘He’s sort of friends with Poirot in a strange kind of way, although he is certainly irritated by the fact that this Belgian detective keeps beating him.’
As Poirot’s secretary, Miss Lemon, Pauline Moran also displayed the affection she felt for Poirot, even if he did infuriate her at times. Though she’d trained at RADA and worked a lot on television,
as well as appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, once again, we had never worked together before. But she grasped immediately that her character was almost a reflection of Poirot.
As Pauline explained about Miss Lemon, ‘She has the same fastidiousness and obsession with detail and precision as Poirot. I have a great aptitude for minute detail myself.’
Pauline also grasped that although Poirot was always respectful and charming towards women, he was also always reserved with them, and so she remained meticulously professional with him in every scene, never flirting for a moment, no matter how much she may have cared about him privately. She was ‘a wonderful secretary and very, very proper with Poirot’, as she puts it. ‘If she was even thirty seconds late, both of them would be horrified.’
In fact, The Adventure of the Clapham Cook encapsulated much of what would develop in the years to come. Poirot’s fussiness; his pride in his ‘little grey cells’ and in being Belgian not French; his capacity for generosity of spirit, especially towards servants; his respect for Miss Lemon; his delight in Hastings’ loyalty; his fondness for Japp; and, perhaps most of all, his ability to laugh at himself – for example, by framing the cheque for one guinea that Mrs Todd sent him after dispensing with his services.
The spectacular sets, clothes, props and locations underlined the authenticity that everyone wanted to bring to every frame. The audience truly felt that they were being transported to 1935, 1936 or 1937. The only downside was that we were forced to film each of the one-hour stories in just eleven shooting days, one of the tightest production schedules it is possible to imagine.
That meant that the only real chance I had to learn my lines for the next day’s shooting came when I got home at about 8.30 p.m. each night, which was incredibly taxing. I would then repeat them to myself in the car on the way to the studio the next morning, which meant that my driver Sean heard every line, as I used to speak them out loud.