by David Suchet
The third film, The Plymouth Express, was a revelation, because it underlined just how much the Poirot series could now attract some of the finest actors in the profession. The cast included the exceptional Kenneth Haigh, who was the original Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s ground-breaking drama Look Back in Anger in 1956. I had known him in the theatre, and was immensely pleased that he accepted the part of a deceiving ‘fence’ in the story. He was a great addition to the cast.
But it wasn’t just established actors that were attracted to the new Poirot series; the films also featured great actors who would later go on to become stars. That was certainly true for Wasps’ Nest, the fourth film, which featured a thirty-something Peter Capaldi, later to become rightly famous for his role as the malevolent spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the political series The Thick of It, and has now become the latest Doctor Who. Scots-born and intensely charismatic, Peter played the artist Claude Langton, who is acting as a clown at a village fete near the beginning of the story, and he did it beautifully.
The other thing that sticks in my mind from that film is that I found myself, once again, standing up for Poirot’s foibles against the wishes of the film’s director, Brian Farnham. Brian had set up an enormous crane shot to look down on the fete and its fairground, and he wanted Poirot to walk into the scene, as the camera watches him from above, and then shout across the fairground to Hastings.
I just could not do it. I took Brian aside and told him, ‘I’m so, so sorry, but Poirot just would not do that. It’s not within his being. He would never shout across to people; he would walk all the way over to Hastings rather than yell at him.’
I felt really badly about it, because here I was taking a wonderful director’s shot away from him, and the crew had spent so long getting it ready, but I simply could not let Poirot down – no matter how embarrassed I felt.
Brian was very understanding, and so were the crew, but it did mean everyone had to rework the scene to allow me to walk across and speak to Hastings, as Poirot would have done. The irony is that in the short story itself, written by Dame Agatha in 1929, Hastings never appears. He was one of the additions for the screenplay.
After our debate about that crane shot, I made a point of always going onto the set in advance and discussing the camera setup with Brian, to avoid it ever happening again. In fact, Wasps’ Nest became one of my favourite films of the series, not least because Peter Capaldi turned in such an extraordinary performance.
In the fifth film, the director, Renny Rye, who had worked on the first series, allowed me to indulge Poirot’s obsessions without a moment’s hesitation. So there I was, once again, laying my handkerchief on the ground to allow Poirot to kneel down without staining his trousers to examine some bird’s eggs that played their part in the story of a fictional ‘great crime’ which is, in fact, the creation of the owner of the local hotel, who has ambitions to be a crime novelist. Poirot helps him to find an ending to his story, while at the same time revealing the truth behind The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor.
‘Hercule Poirot sees everything and forgets nothing,’ as he says while solving the murder at the manor, which seems to have been caused by a ghost, but, of course, is not. Part of the delight of the film is that it sees Poirot discover a waxwork of himself, which both horrifies and enraptures him at the same time. I think I would feel rather the same way if I ever came across a waxwork of me.
If Wasps’ Nest was one of my favourite films in the series, there is no doubt that Double Clue was the most poignant. First written in 1925, it introduces the one woman with whom Poirot truly falls in love, the flamboyant, exotic Countess Vera Rossakoff.
She was to appear in two later Poirot stories, but this was their first meeting and, for Poirot – and me – it was never to be forgotten.
Like Irene Adler for Sherlock Holmes in the 1891 Conan Doyle story A Scandal in Bohemia, the Countess will always be ‘the woman’ for Poirot. Yet she does not outwit him, as Adler did Holmes. Instead, Poirot allows her to get away with her crimes of stealing jewels from some of the wealthiest families in England. He signally does not hand her over to Chief Inspector Japp, who has come to him in a state of some considerable anxiety, so worried is he about losing his job after failing to catch the thief at the centre of a string of such high-profile robberies.
The Countess was played by the striking actress Kika Markham, who had something of a reputation at that time for playing strong women, and she brought exactly the right amount of glamour and dignity that the role demanded. She certainly made the Countess all the more attractive to Poirot.
‘You are the most remarkable, the most unique woman I have met,’ Poirot tells her, as the story unfolds. ‘It is crime which has brought us together.’
Yet Poirot also tells the Countess, with a deep sadness in his voice, ‘Marriage is not for me.’ The end of the film has him effectively saying goodbye to any chance of love, and – as he waves the Countess away to a new life in the United States – reveals that he is condemned to remain wrapped forever in his own loneliness.
As he helps her leave the country and escape justice, Poirot and the Countess re-enact one of the most romantic scenes in the history of British cinema: the lovers’ parting in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, although this time it is the woman who is leaving the country for a new life, while Poirot is left standing on the station platform, alone with his thoughts of what might have been.
In the next film in the series, Poirot confronts menace rather than love.
The Mystery of the Spanish Chest first appeared in Dame Agatha’s collection of short stories The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding in 1960, which hardly sounds threatening at all. Yet it is one of the most frightening stories she wrote. It was actually an expanded version of one of her earlier stories, The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest, which first appeared in a collection called The Regatta Mystery in the United States in 1939, but was not published in Britain until 1960.
Chilling from the very start, it opens with a ferocious fencing match involving the mysterious Colonel Curtiss, who, it transpires, might just be a British spymaster. He was played by another extraordinary actor John McEnery, then in his late forties and capable of conveying malice in the most dramatic way. An old friend, he was a former member of the National Theatre and had made his name in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet.
When John held a sword to my throat during the filming of The Spanish Chest, it was one of the few times when both Poirot and I felt truly frightened, for he made it so realistic that there was a moment when I almost convinced myself that he would actually plunge the blade into my throat. It shows on the screen.
Set once again among the English upper classes, Poirot is hired by Lady Abbie Chatterton because she is afraid that her friend Marguerita Clayton may be killed by her husband Edward, who has a violent temper. As a result, Poirot is invited to a party to meet Clayton, who – mysteriously – fails to appear. His body is found the following day, hidden in a chest. He has been stabbed through the eye.
With a terrific script from Anthony Horowitz, and directed by Andrew Grieve, it allowed another of those special moments when Poirot and I came together.
‘I was lucky, that is all,’ Poirot says near the end of the story, and then adds, with a slight twinkle in his eye, ‘It is more English, yes, the humbleness.’ There is a pause before he concludes, with his tongue in his cheek, ‘No one shall match Hercule Poirot for his humility.’
Like Poirot, I too believe in humility, but there is a twinkle in both of us, for there is also an element of confidence, perhaps even vanity, which we both share. How could we do what we do if there were not?
John McEnery was not the only old friend to grace the new series. The eighth film, The Adventure of the Royal Ruby, featured both the late Freddie Treves and Stephanie Cole, both of whom I had known for a long time. Freddie served in the merchant navy during the Second World War, and was awarded the British Empire Medal for bravery, which som
ehow led him to play a series of military officers after training at RADA. Stephanie, on the other hand, seemed to have been playing elderly ladies from her late thirties, not least in the BBC television series Tenko and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Both helped the story of The Royal Ruby a great deal, and I was delighted that such fine actors wanted to be in the series.
Originally called The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding when it was first published in Britain in 1960, The Royal Ruby opens with Poirot delighting in being able to spend Christmas alone with a specially selected box of his favourite Belgian chocolates. But his plans are upset when he is asked by the British government to investigate the theft of a priceless stone that belongs to Prince Farouk, a member of the Egyptian royal family. Poirot discovers the Prince has given it to a mysterious young woman, and follows her to the country home of a noted Egyptologist, played by Freddie, with Stephanie as his wife.
My very favourite moment comes when everyone sits down to dinner on Christmas Eve and Poirot demonstrates exactly how to prepare and eat a mango. In fact, I asked for the scene to be put into the film and I must explain why.
In April 1990, just a few weeks before we were to start filming Poirot again, I received a letter from Buckingham Palace inviting me to a ‘private’ lunch with Her Majesty on 2 May, which was my forty-fourth birthday. Both Sheila and I were astonished, and I even asked her, partly as a joke, whether she thought it might be a hoax. But when Sheila rang the number in the letter, it turned out to be absolutely true.
And so it was that I found myself having lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on my birthday that year. There were twelve guests in all, and I discovered that Her Majesty likes to invite people from all walks of life that she finds interesting.
During lunch, I was deep in discussion with Prince Philip, who was sitting three chairs along from me on my side of the table, opposite the Queen, when I heard someone whisper in my left ear, ‘Would you care for some fruit, sir?’
Without looking round, I nodded and put my hand into the giant fruit bowl that was being offered and I picked up something and put it on the plate in front of me. Then I looked down in horror. Without knowing it, I had picked a mango. I was horrified – I did not have any idea at all about how to peel it, or eat it, in ‘polite company’.
Suffering from an acute attack of nerves, I turned to the Duke and confessed, ‘Sir, I find myself in a most embarrassing situation – I wonder if you could help me. I am most terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea how to deal with this mango.’
That provoked an enormous laugh from Prince Philip, who replied immediately, ‘Well, let me show you.’
The Duke proceeded to take another mango and show me exactly what I should do. He took a sharp knife and put the tip into the mango until he could feel the pip at its centre. Then he went round the fruit, with the tip of the knife still held against the pip, until the mango was effectively in two halves, though still attached to the pip.
He then removed the knife, and placed a dessert spoon through the cut until he could feel the pip. He then used the spoon to loosen the pip from one side, and then repeated this on the other.
‘Once you’ve done this,’ he told me with a smile, ‘you will be able to twist the two parts of the fruit apart. You then remove the pip altogether and cut across the soft fruit in the centre of both parts with a sharp knife.
‘Once you have done that, you can turn each half inside out with your thumbs, so that the skin of each half is on the plate with the fruit uppermost. Then you can eat the mango.’
I was tremendously relieved that I wasn’t left floundering and was now able to eat the mango in front of me.
Sean was driving me that day, and when I got back into the car after lunch, I immediately rang Brian Eastman to tell him the story and say that we simply had to include it in the dinner that formed part of the story of The Royal Ruby.
There is even a little joke about it in the film itself. When one of the dinner guests asks how Poirot knows how to treat a mango, the screenwriter Anthony Horowitz wrote the line, ‘A certain duke taught me.’
We sent a copy of the finished film to Buckingham Palace on DVD, and I’m thrilled to say that it became the late Queen Mother’s favourite film. Indeed, whenever I’ve met the Duke of Edinburgh since that lunch, he always calls me ‘the mango man’.
I remember being tremendously pleased by the production values on display in the penultimate film of the series. The Affair at the Victory Ball, for example, needed a lavish set for a fancy-dress extravaganza to which every guest is supposed to come ‘dressed as someone famous’. Poirot insists that he is quite famous enough to go as himself, though, in a little joke, Hastings decides to go as the Scarlet Pimpernel. The opening shots of the film focus on a set of beautiful pottery figures of the characters from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. When two of the guests, who are dressed as characters from the Commedia, are found dead, Poirot finds himself helping Japp to reveal the murderer. At the end of the shoot, I was given the mock porcelain figures as a present, which I still have.
Part of the story of The Victory Ball takes place in a radio studio – and includes a little joke when one character in Andrew Marshall’s script insists, ‘Actors never know when to stop.’ In fact, the denouement is held in a studio and broadcast live to the listening audience, with Poirot reconstructing what happened at the ball. Yet, no matter what the script may have suggested, Poirot knows exactly when to stop, no matter the temptation of a studio and a microphone.
The last story broadcast in the third series, The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge, is set during a grouse shoot on a moor in Yorkshire. It originally appeared in Dame Agatha’s first collection of short stories, Poirot Investigates, in 1923, a collection that came into existence after being commissioned by the editor of the London-based illustrated weekly the Sketch. The stories appeared weekly before they were published in book form, much as the Sherlock Holmes stories had done in the Strand Magazine nearly thirty years earlier.
The shoot itself was cold, very cold. The temperature on the Yorkshire moors was freezing, and I kept falling off the shooting stick Poirot was supposed to be sitting on, because the ground was so soft after a long period of rain that my stick would not stay in place. On one occasion, it took the production team twenty minutes to clean me up again, as Poirot must never appear to be dirty, of course. In the film, Poirot catches a cold – just as I inevitably did. That happened many times over the years that I played him. I always seemed to catch whatever it was Poirot was supposed to have, and this was one of those cases. I remember it as one of the coldest shoots I had ever been on – there was snow on the ground and I was shivering, in spite of taking the precaution of wearing thermal underwear under my padding.
In the end, Poirot retires to bed in his hotel to recover, leaving Hastings and Japp to track down the murderer of the wealthy landowner of Harrington Place, who is holding the shoot on his land. But Poirot and I recovered sufficiently to uncover the killer in a denouement in front of the family living at Hunter’s Lodge.
The shoot for the third series came to an end shortly before Christmas 1990, and the first film was due to be broadcast by London Weekend on Sunday, 6 January 1991. Yet again, it was an astonishingly quick turnaround for such complicated films – the last of the ten was to go out on 10 March – and the decision to televise them so quickly after we had finished filming meant that we always seemed to be rushing to finish one before immediately starting the next.
I remember thinking, as Sean and I drove back to Pinner, ‘How many actors have had the life I’ve had – and the opportunity to play such an extraordinary part?’
By then I had played Poirot thirty times in thirty stories, including two two-hour specials, a total of thirty-two hours of prime-time television. What would happen next?
Chapter 9
‘YOU HAVE TO MAKE SURE THAT NOTHING GOES TO YOUR HEAD’
As the last Poirot episode I had
filmed was transmitted, all I knew for certain was that London Weekend had not taken out an option on me for another series. I looked forward to playing him again but I was also aware that my children were growing up and I had to keep working. I had to try to make sure I was available in case another Poirot series was commissioned, but there was also a life to be lived, and that meant working.
It was my uncertainty about the future, and my need to work, that encouraged me to accept what some of my friends thought was a rather unlikely role – that of the anarchist and spy Alfred Verloc in a new BBC adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s dark Victorian masterpiece The Secret Agent, which was first published in 1907, but set in 1886.
The script was by the British playwright Dusty Hughes and the director, another Englishman, David Drury, had assembled a terrific cast, including Cheryl Campbell, to play my wife Winnie, Patrick Malahide as the assistant commissioner of the Metro-politan Police, and Warren Clarke as Chief Inspector Heat, the detective bent on tracking down the agent provocateur Verloc in London’s East End.
Verloc was a milestone for me because it was the first genuinely evil part that I had played on television, and it was in the starkest possible contrast to the endlessly charming, if sometimes irritating, Poirot. There was no disguising the fact that Verloc was an evil man, intent on destroying society, and that it would be hard for any audience to find much affection for him. But playing him provided me with a real challenge: to bring to life one of European literature’s most malignant souls without turning him into a monster with a tail and horns. Indeed, in spite of the material, I never once allowed myself to be depressed by his character, no matter how despicable he might be. I knew that Verloc was an opportunity to show myself to the audience in a different light, and that meant a great deal to me.
By now I was forty-five years old, a time when most people are pretty settled in their lives and career. They have a house and children, as I did, and, if they are lucky, they also have a fairly predictable future. But no actor has that luxury – certainly not one determined to make a career out of being a character actor, as I was. I had known for a long time that I had to be more flexible than that, and take the chances I was offered. But I could not have managed that without Sheila’s support, because she understood – having been an actress herself – exactly what an actor’s lifestyle meant. It was always a rollercoaster, with neither of us knowing what was to come next.