by David Suchet
The Dream was the last to be shot, and we finished just a few days before Christmas 1988. By then, I had discovered that London Weekend had scheduled the films to start on the Sunday night exactly two weeks after Christmas Day, on 8 January 1989. The ten we had shot that year were to go out every Sunday evening thereafter at 8.45 p.m., ending on 19 March.
I honestly had no idea how they were going to turn out. In fact, I was privately rather frightened that they might be boring. I remember thinking to myself that these films were not action-packed like The Professionals or The Sweeney, both hugely successful in their time, nor were they comparable to the more recent Morse and Wexford series. Were they going to be entertaining enough for an audience in 1989?
‘I’m afraid they’re going to be too tame, or too eccentric,’ I thought to myself.
At that end of the final day of shooting in December 1988, we had a party for the crew and regular members of the cast at Twickenham. Brian Eastman made a little speech, and then so did I. What I said precisely reflected my private uncertainty.
‘I really have no idea whether Poirot will work,’ I told everyone that evening. ‘Possibly it won’t, and so there might never be another series, which is why I want to say thank you to everybody here for all you’ve done to make it such a wonderful experience.’
What I did know, however, was that I had never been more tired in my acting career. I walked off the set on that final night utterly exhausted. I was barely off the screen throughout almost 500 minutes of prime-time television – working fourteen-and fifteen-hour days, and I could hardly think.
Sean took me home to our new house in Pinner, and I all but collapsed. Christmas was not quite cancelled, but it was jolly close to it, though I made every effort not to show it for the sake of the children. But Sheila knew.
All we had to do now was to wait and see what the reaction would be.
Yet, in my heart, I was afraid that no more films were going to be made, and that meant that I was going to have to say goodbye to the little Belgian whom I had grown so incredibly fond of. We had become so close that the pain of losing him would be almost too much to bear.
Chapter 5
‘IT WAS LIKE BEING HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A MALLET’
We had a family Christmas. Robert and Katherine were still quite young, and both my parents, as well as Sheila’s mother, were still alive, so there was plenty to keep us occupied. But in the back of my mind, I could not stop thinking about Poirot. I was gradually recovering from the strain of filming, but I still wondered what the audience would think.
The publicity for the series started immediately after the holiday, and I suddenly found myself doing interview after interview about playing the role, without really knowing whether it worked on the screen. I was fascinated to know what the audience were being told about the nature of my work, and what the journalists I was meeting thought about the films themselves, as they’d seen at least the first episode in a preview, as they usually do. Thankfully, many of them were kind enough to tell me how good they thought it was.
That came as something of a relief, as I had not seen any of the films in their entirety. Brian Eastman had shown me bits of the filming here and there, when there was something we specifically needed to discuss, but the schedule was so tight that there was no time for me to sit down and look at every film as it was completed.
Nevertheless, as the days passed, and the first showing came ever closer, I got my first clue about how Agatha Christie’s Poirot had turned out.
On the Friday morning of 6 January 1989 a piece by the veteran entertainment writer David Lewin appeared in the Daily Mail which said, very flatteringly, ‘David Suchet has become Britain’s first character actor star on television.’ He had been one of the first people I talked to during the run of publicity after Christmas.
David then went on to compare me to Sir Alec Guinness, who was more famous for the characters he played than for his own personality – not least in the great Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets and David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai. It was a great compliment, as I had always been an admirer of Guinness and his work, but to be mentioned in the same breath was a little overwhelming.
But when Sheila and I sat down together to watch The Adventure of the Clapham Cook go out on that Sunday evening in January 1989, we still really did not know what I would be like, how the series would look, or what the reaction would be. Even after we watched it, I wasn’t exactly sure whether the audience would like it.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Sheila.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘And so were you. It will be a tremendous success.’
I’m not sure I believed her. After all, this was only my second outing in a high-profile television series after Blott on the Landscape. In my heart, I still thought of myself as a rather serious classical actor. Could I mix the two? Could I be both Poirot and Iago?
On Monday morning I realised that I could, or at least the critics thought I could. They loved the show, and so, apparently, did the audience. London Weekend rang to tell me that more than eight million people had watched it the night before, a huge proportion of the television audience in the country.
As I looked at some of the reviews in the papers, I said to Sheila, ‘I cannot believe what I’m reading. It is quite extraordinary.’ I think she was as surprised as I was.
In the Daily Express, for example, Antonia Swinson called my portrayal of Poirot ‘definitive’, and added that I’d ‘stepped nimbly into the role, with a beautiful set of moustaches, and every tiny detail of his appearance and personality perfect. Poirot now lives.’
Jaci Stephen, in that afternoon’s London Evening Standard, called me ‘brilliant’ and added, ‘More than any of his predecessors, he brought to the Belgian detective’s character an entertaining mix of humour, inquisitiveness and pedantry.’
My mind went back to the previous summer on the Isles of Scilly, when Geoffrey had told me that Poirot would change my life. Although I still did not quite realise how much, that Monday morning in January 1989 showed beyond doubt that it had. Nothing was ever to be quite the same again.
To prove it, on the Tuesday morning, I was scheduled to have breakfast at the Ritz Hotel in London with a man from the Daily Telegraph called Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd. Hugh could clearly see that I was in a state of shock. His interview with me appeared the following morning, and neatly captured the new world that I suddenly found myself inhabiting.
‘With the fame that only the telly can bestow,’ Hugh wrote, ‘David Suchet, alias Hercule Poirot, woke up yesterday morning to find himself a household name.’
Though we had never met before, Hugh and I got on terribly well at that breakfast – even though we only had fruit and muesli, as we were both on a diet – and he kindly concluded by describing me as ‘most sympathetic and unactorish’ as well as a ‘sensitive and unshowy artist’ who was ‘surely a major star of the future’.
I was stunned when I read that the following morning.
The good reviews kept on coming. The following Sunday, Alan Coren in the Mail on Sunday suggested that ‘by homing in unerringly on the most telegenic of Poirot’s quirks’, I had succeeded in making the character entirely my own.
As the reviews flowed, so did the fan letters. Suddenly people I did not know were writing to me as though I were a long-lost friend, and that started a train of thought in my mind that has remained with me ever since – what was it that people liked about Poirot?
I am convinced that the reaction to my work in that first series was more to do with Poirot than me. The reason the reviews were so flattering was because it was Dame Agatha’s Poirot that mattered to them, not me. It was she and her creation that won their hearts and minds.
The fact that he had a kind heart was her work, not mine. The fact that he was always polite and respectful towards women was her doing, not mine, as was his charm and gentleness towards servants and waiters. His tendency to choose the wrong words
– and allow himself to be corrected by Hastings – was her idea, not mine, as was his acute awareness of his fellow characters’ sadness from time to time.
What I was doing was communicating Poirot’s character to the world, and that was my job – to serve my original creator and my script writer.
In those first days after the series had begun on ITV, I realised for the first time that Poirot touches people’s hearts in a way that I had never anticipated when I started to play him. I cannot put my finger on precisely how he does it, but somehow he makes those who watch him feel secure. People see him and feel better. I don’t know exactly why that is, but there is something about him. My performance had touched that nerve.
That showed only too clearly in the audience’s reaction. My mail bag of fan letters exploded overnight. Within a few weeks of the series starting in 1989, I was getting a hundred letters a week. Many of them were deeply touching.
It was like being hit over the head with a mallet. I did not know what had happened.
The show’s success was a joy, but I still was not sure whether there would ever be another series, and I was an actor with a family to support. The reviews and fan letters were wonderful, but I had to work.
In fact, I had agreed to do two pieces for television: a screen version of Tom Kempinski’s Separation, the play I had done at Hampstead and at the Comedy Theatre not all that long before Poirot started, and a new production of Edward Bond’s Bingo, in which I was to play William Shakespeare. I was to portray him as a manic-depressive genius who had retired to Stratford-upon-Avon as a rich and disillusioned man.
Both parts could hardly have been further from Poirot, but they proved to me that my peers in the profession saw me as a character actor who could transform himself. I hoped the British public did too.
Mind you, my new found ‘fame’ took me to some strange places. Not long after the first series started, Sheila and I found ourselves featured in Hello! magazine, hardly a place that we thought that we would ever appear. We were photographed in our new house in Pinner, rather as though we were some sort of minor foreign royalty, which was a decidedly surreal experience, not least because the magazine suggested I was in ‘a heady haze of euphoria’ over my ‘worldwide success’.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. It would have been more accurate to say that, far from being euphoric, Sheila and I were desperately worried about whether we would be able to stay in our house. London Weekend, as a part of the ITV network, had an option for Brian Eastman to produce and me to play a second series of ten Poirot films, but they had not exercised their options yet, which meant our financial position was still not exactly secure.
Would there ever be any more work? Could we pay the mortgage and the bills? I should confess that in the nineteen years before my first series as Poirot, I had never earned very much. I may have been a character actor with what I think was a good reputation, but I certainly was not a rich one.
It was not until late in February 1989 that ITV confirmed that they actually wanted to do a second series – on an almost identical schedule to the first. They were anxious for me to film another ten stories between early July and Christmas 1989, which they would broadcast between January and March 1990.
This time, Nick Elliott at London Weekend, who had been the executive producer on the first series with his colleague Linda Agran, wanted Brian Eastman to deliver an opening two-hour film, to be broadcast in early January 1990, based on Dame Agatha’s magnificent Cornish mystery Peril at End House, and then a one-hour story for the each of the following eight Sundays. My Poirot was to become the cornerstone of ITV’s Sunday nights.
It wasn’t the critics that had convinced London Weekend to commission another series – though they were as thrilled by their reviews as I was. It was down to the fact that the viewing figures for each Sunday evening had stayed in their millions, and had even edged up from time to time. The series had also begun to sell around the world. As well as Canada and the United States, it looked as though other countries, particularly in Europe, were interested. Belgium had already started transmitting the films.
As a result of that worldwide audience, in addition to Peril at End House and the eight stories, London Weekend wanted Brian to produce a full-length special at the end of the second series: the very first Poirot story, The Mysterious Affair at Styles – the first book that Dame Agatha ever published. It was to be broadcast later in 1990, to celebrate the centenary of her birth.
The decision to commission a second series was a great compliment, as it would firmly establish my Poirot in the public consciousness, but it was also a great relief. It meant we would be able to stay in our house – at least for another year. Elmdene, as it was called, was becoming the house that Poirot built.
Just as importantly, however, the second series meant that I was going to become ‘that little man’ again, which made me truly happy. No matter what my fears might have been as an actor, I certainly wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Hercule Poirot. I’d come to care about him far, far too much for that.
Chapter 6
‘I WANTED HIM TO BECOME EVEN MORE HUMAN’
It was another hot summer’s day, this time in late June 1989, when I became Hercule Poirot for the second time, and climbed back into my padding and his immaculate clothes to resume my relationship with the little man who had swept into my life, knocked me off my feet and come to mean so much to me.
And, once again, I would be revealing his foibles alongside my own, and sharing his obsessions with mine. For I was sure that this time the closeness between us would be revealed even more than it had been just a few months earlier, during the first series.
The first of the second series was to be the two-hour special, Peril at End House, shot partly on location, which opened with Poirot on an aeroplane on his way to a holiday in the west of England – and plainly not enjoying it at all. In fact, Poirot is feeling very uncomfortable indeed, because he does not like flying and makes no secret of the fact, while Hastings is sitting beside him looking serene and untroubled. In the character notes I had written about Poirot before the first series, I had at number six: ‘Hates to fly. Makes him feel sick,’ and so the scene was a perfect cameo of one of his little idiosyncrasies.
Dame Agatha wrote the full-length novel on which the film was based in 1932, and many of her admirers regard it as one of her finest murder-mysteries, even though in her own autobiography, published more than forty years later, she confessed that it had made so little impression on her that she could not even remember having written it. That led some commentators to mistakenly undervalue what is, to me, one of her most ingenious stories.
Poirot and Hastings are taking a holiday at ‘the Queen of Watering Places’ on the south-west coast of England, the fictional St Loo in Cornwall, where they are staying at the Majestic Hotel, which reminds Hastings of the French Riviera. A good proportion of the film was actually shot on location in Salcombe in Devon, rather than the studio, but the interesting thing for me was that Dame Agatha almost certainly used her own experience of the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, her birthplace, as part of its inspiration.
Here was another strange echo of my life intertwining with Poirot’s. My father had a serviced apartment in the Imperial Hotel, which he and my mother visited regularly. So the world that Poirot was walking into in Peril at End House was one that I recognised immediately, having been there myself with them in the early 1980s.
At the Majestic, Poirot and Hastings meet a charming, if slightly anxious, young woman called ‘Nick’ Buckley, who lives at End House, high on the cliffs at the edge of town. Intriguingly for Poirot, she seems to have survived no fewer than three escapes from death in the past week, which convinces him that someone is trying to kill her. She laughs his theory off as a joke, until her cousin Maggie is actually killed – perhaps having been mistaken for her.
Directed by Renny Rye from the first series, and featuring another of Clive Exton’s scripts, End Hou
se portrays a world of women in evening dresses and men in white tie and tails every night, with exotic cocktails before dinner, and obligatory ballroom dancing after it. It also features two of Dame Agatha’s familiar, unlikely subsidiary characters, this time a slightly mysterious Australian couple who help to look after End House – a wheelchair-bound wife and a caring husband – whom Poirot describes as ‘almost too good to be true’.
In the wake of the uncomfortable aeroplane flight, another of Poirot’s foibles emerges immediately after he arrives in St Loo, when a waiter at breakfast serves him two boiled eggs of different sizes, which he refuses to touch as they offend his very particular sense of order. I had already put that down as number forty-two in my list of character notes: ‘Will often have boiled eggs for breakfast. If more than one, they must be the same size or he really can’t eat them.’
Poirot waves them away, but I made sure that he did so without looking petulant or silly, for I had made up my mind firmly that on this second series I would use every opportunity to make him as human as I could, no matter how odd his obsessions, and to reveal him as a warmer man than perhaps he had appeared in our first ten films.
Clive Exton’s script certainly helped me. For he too wanted a little more humour in the new series, to make Poirot a bit more moving. It was an excellent idea, even if I sometimes had to restrain him from going too far towards making the little Belgian a comic character, for that certainly was not the Poirot I knew and wanted to portray. But at the same time, Clive also brightened both Hastings and Japp, making them a little less stiff. All this helped to make the films feel more affectionate towards Poirot than some of the first series.