by David Suchet
It is left to the then just Inspector Japp, who appears from London to participate in the investigation, to give us a little of Poirot’s background by introducing him to a local police superintendent by saying that they had worked together on the ‘Abercrombie forgery case’ (in the novel, that is indentified as taking place in 1904) and adding that ‘we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Monsieur Poirot here’. The superintendent looks distinctly unimpressed by this odd-looking little man with a strange accent and a rather peculiar walk.
Poirot is undeterred. He positively relishes what is a complicated investigation, capable of several different solutions, and which calls on him to examine the exact nature of strychnine poisoning. But it also contains many of the elements that Dame Agatha used time and again in her stories. There is a large country house, with the servants necessary to maintain it, complete with a tennis lawn and stables to allow the guests to ride in the mornings, while the grooms look after the horses.
There is a sense in the story, and in our film, that those days of British Edwardian grandeur are fading as the impact of war introduces a new and different world, one in which old traditions and habits are ever more difficult to maintain. Poirot catches this when he describes one of the older female servants, Dorcas, in the novel by saying: ‘I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’
There is also the hint – in the murder of Mrs Inglethorp – that the time has suddenly arrived when young men are becoming increasingly impatient for their inheritance, no longer prepared to wait their turn under what they see as the ‘yoke’ of their elders. Dame Agatha is quietly drawing attention to the materialism that she sensed was creeping into the world around her when she wrote the novel in 1916.
Nevertheless, all the essential ingredients of an Agatha Christie Poirot mystery are there, including a typically expansive denouement in which he seems to suggest that almost every single resident of Styles Court could have been guilty of poisoning Mrs Inglethorp, before finally revealing the killer. Yet the more he weaves his magical spell and unravels the story’s many puzzles, the more the story’s characters and the audience comes to love him. As Cynthia, Mrs Inglethorp’s protégé, puts it, ‘He is such a dear little man!’ Poirot may leave the fictional Cavendish family in tatters in the novel and the film, but that does not detract for a moment from his audience’s delight in him.
It is a delight that remains to this day. I am constantly amazed by people’s affection for him. When people meet me, or stop me in the street, or come to see me in a play, they always want to talk about Poirot. Some of them even send enormous letters explaining exactly how much he means to them.
It is humbling, and almost overwhelming, because everyone I talk to seems to love him, though I never set out to make him loved – only to make him true to Dame Agatha’s creation.
Yet when we finished filming the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in December 1989, I wasn’t sure whether there would ever be another. London Weekend had not written an option into my contract for a new series – as they had into my contract for the first. In fact, there was no guarantee whatsoever from any-one associated with the production that there would ever be a third series.
Once again, I was high and dry, not sure what might happen next, and yet desperate to go on playing the little man that everyone seemed to love so much.
Sheila and I tried to organise my life so that I would be available to play him again if the chance presented itself, but in the meantime I still had a family to support, not to mention a house to maintain. In the second week of the first series being transmitted, part of the roof had fallen in on us, quite without warning.
But that wasn’t the reason I wanted to play Poirot again. He had become a part of my life, almost like a best friend. I too had come to love him. The thought that I might never bring him to life again made me sad because I wanted nothing more than to make room for him in my career.
Chapter 8
‘TELEVISION’S UNLIKELIEST HEARTTHROB . . .THE MANGO MAN’
Another Christmas, and that niggling anxiety remained: would I be reunited with the idiosyncratic detective? I did not know, and neither did Sheila. We just knew, as we celebrated with the family, that the fans loved him and the critics liked him. But would that last? Might the audience be getting bored with Poirot and me?
The answer came quickly, and I should not have worried. On 7 January 1990, a Sunday evening, ITV launched the second series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot with our two-hour special of Peril at End House, and to my intense relief, the British press were every bit as generous as they had been a year earlier.
In fact, even before the reviews appeared, I knew they liked the series, because there was a string of enthusiastic previews. Astonishingly, it was becoming clear that the little Belgian was almost on the brink of becoming a national treasure. It was a far cry from the first days of filming, eighteen months earlier, when no one knew what the world would think.
The television highlights for 1990 all included charming remarks about the new Poirot series, and, remarkably, his effect on women viewers.
On the Sunday morning the series began, the People newspaper reported that I was receiving ‘sacks of mail from adoring women who simper and sigh at his portrayal of the elderly, moustachioed hero’. It wasn’t quite true, but I was certainly getting dozens of letters a week at the peak of the series, though not quite all of them from women.
That same morning, the Sunday Mirror reported: ‘Poirot has become a great family favourite’ and a ‘hit with women viewers too’. For my part, I had told the paper, ‘A lot of ladies want to look after him . . . For although he’s very self-sufficient, he is also slightly vulnerable. They want to help him in any way possible . . . And yet he is irritating and objectionable in lots of ways. He’s a typical bachelor.’
That vulnerability was something I had been striving for throughout the second series, as I told the Today newspaper. One of its writers, Ivan Waterman, did an interview with me and I explained to him what I had been aiming at. ‘I like Poirot very much,’ I said. ‘He’s a great humanitarian – he has this love of people. He is a very warm man and I like to think I care as well.’ It was entirely true.
The day before, the Sun had shared with its readers twenty clues they had unearthed about Poirot and me, including the fact that I – like Poirot – was ‘ultra-tidy’ and paid ‘particular attention to detail’; that I’d met Sheila when we were both appearing in a stage production of Dracula in Coventry in 1972; and that I had played in the junior finals at Wimbledon at the age of fourteen, but had given up tennis for acting. In fact, the truth was that I just could not find the time to keep playing tennis at the level that I wanted to. If there was a sport that I did give up for acting, it was rugby, which I loved, but the need for training just did not leave me time for acting.
All these personal details felt slightly surreal; I am a character actor, not a star or a celebrity, and that sense of the unreal only increased when, a few weeks later, Women’s Realm magazine called me ‘TV’s unlikeliest heart-throb’ – even though they also described me as ‘portly’.
Nevertheless, Women’s Realm also gave me a chance to explain what I felt about the little man, especially when I told them that an ‘actor has to fall in love with his character . . . You have to have a deep, intimate relationship with him, get under the surface. I’m very fortunate in that I really like Poirot.’
The British television critics had been very kind. The Sunday Times, in particular, welcomed the return of my ‘definitive, understated portrayal of the Belgian detective’, and the reviews certainly worked in the series’ favour. As January turned into February, in 1990, we began to exceed the audiences of eight million or so every Sunday evening from last season, rising towards ten, eleven and even, briefly, twelve million people each week.
The most intuitive remarks about my work in the new series came from the novelist and journalist Celia
Brayfield, who turned herself into a critic in one of her columns and described my Poirot as ‘enthralling’ and ‘the most mesmeric figure on television’. Celia also pointed out, very shrewdly, that I was unafraid to portray Poirot’s less attractive traits, whilst taking care not to turn him into a caricature.
My peers in the acting profession were equally generous, because just a few days after the new series began, I discovered that one of the episodes in the first series, Triangle at Rhodes, had won first prize in the drama category at the International Film and Television Festival in New York. That happened just days before the first series was to launch in the United States, on Thursday 18 January 1990, as part of the PBS Mystery series.
The American reviews of the first series were astonishing. The Philadelphia Inquirer was particularly kind. Their staff writer, Jonathan Storm, praised the subtlety and integrity of my performance, which ‘. . . over the years, have eluded such fine actors as Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney . . . Suchet adds a benevolence that also makes Poirot a fine friend.’
The Washington Post said that I made ‘a fine Poirot, with just the essential twirl of his absurd moustache of self-importance’, while the New York Times observed carefully that my interpretation ‘does justice to the portrait on the page’, and Broadcast Week called my performance ‘stunning’, adding that, ‘He’s taken the Belgian sleuth and has made him his own.’ The Wall Street Journal concluded firmly: ‘All in all, this Poirot is a delight.’
In Canada, at the same time, the Toronto Star’s Greg Quill was every bit as enthusiastic, describing my performance as ‘the definitive Poirot – an excitable, fastidious, arrogant and essentially egomaniacal sleuth . . . qualities that shine through in his wonderful performance.’
I simply could not have asked for more generous reviews. They made me feel that my work was somehow vindicated.
All this success was wonderful, but – with no guarantee that there would ever be another series – I needed to work. Then, suddenly, a chance presented itself when Trevor Nunn, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company when I worked there in the 70s and 80s, asked me if I would consider playing Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the Young Vic for two months in April and May 1990.
No longer working full-time with the RSC, Trevor had by then established himself as one of the leading directors of the West End stage, with a string of hits, including the musicals Cats and Les Miserables. I had enjoyed working with him on the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman comedy Once in a Lifetime in the West End in 1979, but that was some time ago, and I certainly wanted to work with him again – but what if they suddenly asked me to start a new series of Poirot? Would I be able to do both? What if they overlapped? I really didn’t know what to do.
Finally, after a great deal of heart-searching and without any firm news about a third series, I took the plunge and agreed to do Timon with Trevor. There were to be five weeks of rehearsals and a two-month run, which would take me into the last weeks of May 1990. The only thought in the back of my mind was that if there was going to be another series of Poirot, I was going to be very stretched indeed.
But Timon was a wonderful challenge. One of Shakespeare’s last plays – first performed in 1607 or 1608 – it is not revived all that often. People tend to think it is about children being baked in pies, because they confuse it with Titus Andronicus. In fact, Timon had last been performed by the RSC a decade earlier, in 1981, with Richard Pasco in the leading role, and a few years before that with Paul Scofield as Timon. One reason for the reluctance to perform the play is that it is unfinished. Some experts are even convinced that not all of the play was written by Shakespeare himself.
There were a lot of reasons why I wanted to play the part. Of course, I longed for the challenge – what character actor would not? But it would also be my first time playing Shakespeare with Trevor, something that I had always wanted to do. It would also be the first time I had appeared on the stage since Separation back in 1987, and Timon would give me the opportunity to re-establish myself as a classical stage actor, alongside my television work. I also hoped that I might bring some of the millions of people who watched me on television into the theatre, and thereby unite two parts of my career.
You see, I have always firmly believed that, as an actor, my staple place of work is the theatre, and that means that I must keep returning to it. I have never wanted to be just a television actor, or a movie actor, or a star, or a celebrity. I want to remain exactly what I had always longed to be – a character actor. That’s why, when people ask me if I have a favourite medium, I always tell them that I don’t. I will do anything that allows me to be the actor I always wanted to be.
Before Timon even opened, however, I was thrown into a state of confusion. London Weekend suddenly decided that they were indeed going to do a third series of Poirot, starting in late June, and asked me to play the role again.
For a moment, I was in turmoil. If only they could have asked me earlier! If I went straight on from Timon to Poirot, I was going to be in grave danger of driving myself too hard and weakening my ability to perform as well as I wanted to. But what could I do?
London Weekend made the offer just as the second Poirot series was coming to an end in England, in March 1990, and I was rehearsing Timon. The recent success of the first series in the United States and the fact that it had sold well in Europe (Germany had now taken it too) had more than a little to do with the decision to commission a new set of Poirot, I suspect. In the end, I felt that I had no choice. I decided to play the little man again – I wanted to very much, and the opportunity was too good to turn down. So I agreed to start filming a third series of Poirot immediately after I had finished Timon of Athens in the West End, even though it meant that I would have no time to rest before starting the pre-production of the series. It also meant that I would have been working virtually non-stop throughout the year.
On one level, it is a wonderful thing to be given the chance to work, but on another level, I knew it was going to be both mentally and physically exhausting. Would that hurt my performance as Poirot? I did not think it would, but I would have to wait and see.
In the meantime, there was Timon of Athens to be launched. Thankfully, my approach to the play seemed to work for the audience, because the reviews were excellent and the theatre was full – some of the audience no doubt tempted by the possibility of seeing Poirot on stage. But it was a long piece, of almost three hours, and the second act in particular was all consuming. I left the theatre at the end of eight performances each week absolutely drained – though very satisfied with what I had achieved.
In fact, though I did not realise it for a time, Timon helped to establish me as an actor who could bring an audience into the theatre, and I was enormously grateful to the part for that.
No sooner had the run at the Young Vic finished, than I was back at Twickenham Studios in pre-production for Poirot, though certainly not feeling quite as fresh as I had when I’d started two summers before.
By chance, just as we started work on the new series, another of my television performances – playing a tortured William Shakespeare in a production of Edward Bond’s Bingo – was broadcast, confirming the fact that I was certainly not only playing my little Belgian friend.
Once again, a television magazine kindly described me as ‘fast becoming the Alec Guinness of his generation – the man with a face for every character’. Again, I was very flattered, but I did not have time to bask in the glory. I was too busy getting back into my padding and spats, not to mention a new set of moustaches.
The first film in the new series, all of which were once again based on Dame Agatha’s short stories, was How Does Your Garden Grow? Poirot is to have a rose named after him at the Chelsea Flower Show of 1935, and while there, he meets an elderly lady in a wheelchair who gives him a packet of seeds with the words, ‘I’m sure you will find them quite a revelation.’ Shortly afterwards, she dies in agony in front of the camera, another bold m
ove by the producers, and – just like Mrs Inglethorp at Styles – it turns out that she has been poisoned. Suddenly Poirot finds himself investigating her death at a Surrey house filled with memorabilia from the Russian Orthodox Church, as one of the suspects is a Russian émigré.
Published in Poirot’s Early Cases in both Britain and the United States in 1974, not long before Dame Agatha’s death, it is one of her slighter stories, which needed to be expanded in the script to make it even better for a television audience. To be honest, not every single one of her short stories was easily adaptable to the small screen. Some needed one or two extra ingredients to help them along. It was all done with a little sleight of hand, in this case by the screenwriter Andrew Marshall, to make her stories even more enjoyable.
One of the extra ingredients in the first film is a little sub-plot about Poirot’s new aftershave lotion, which contrives to give Hastings what seems like hay fever, but turns out to be an allergy to the lotion itself. The gentle depiction of Poirot’s vanity and the confusion about what is causing Hastings to sneeze all the time is one of the film’s most charming elements.
The Million Dollar Bond Robbery, the second film, was another of the slighter stories, although it does involve Poirot overcoming his fear of sea-sickness when he and Hastings are required to travel to New York on the maiden voyage of the new Cunard liner, Queen Mary. In the end, though, it is Hastings, not Poirot, who succumbs to mal de mer, much to the detective’s delight.
Directed by Andrew Grieve, who would go on to become one of the regulars on the Poirot films, it focuses on the theft of one million dollars’ worth of bonds from a locked box on the ship as it sails across the Atlantic. Andrew used a great deal of black and white newsreel footage of the original maiden voyage to give his film a firm period flavour and to flesh out the story a little more.