Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  That’s the life you join as an actor, and it was one reason why Sheila and I trained ourselves never to look more than six months into the future – if things went badly, we were always ready to make a change to our lives. It was a thought that sustained us through the good times as well as the bad. If things went badly, we always told each other, we would sell the house and move into something smaller, or even move back into a narrow boat on the canals, which is where we started our life together. It was an attitude that meant we were always ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice if the right chance came up, no matter where it took us.

  I had decided, however, that there was one thing I really could not do while Poirot remained a possibility – and that was to go back to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. But the decision upset me for I loved the company. In fact, I was lucky enough to be asked to rejoin them almost every year, even for just one production, but I knew that making that commitment would demand a long period of my time, and it would also mean that I would not be available for another Poirot series if one was recommissioned. Not going to the RSC was the right thing to do, but it was very hard to refuse my friends there, especially the principal associate director Michael Attenborough, who was always trying, very gently, to persuade me to go back to a company I had always treasured.

  But even though I turned down the RSC, the decision did not depress me, because I have always been a very positive person. I’ve always felt enormously fortunate to be an actor, but I have also realised that you need to keep your feet firmly on the ground if you are. You have to make sure that nothing goes to your head – not even the greatest reviews. And I also believe that the higher you go up the ladder of success, the more certain it is that one day it might just stop. My philosophy was to choose what I did very carefully, and always to do the best and most challenging work that I could, and see where that took me.

  Yet beneath all that, I also knew that I wanted to go on playing Poirot. Some of my friends would ask, ‘Haven’t you had enough of him?’

  But I would always tell them, ‘The public love him, and the truth is, I do too.’

  That made the uncertainty about whether I would play him again all the more testing, but there were consolations – not least the extraordinary fan letters that I had received since Agatha Christie’s Poirot began. I had been used to one or two bits of fan mail in the past, but suddenly a tidal wave of letters overtook me, and they came as a considerable shock. They really did.

  Those letters made me realise that I had a responsibility to the audience to keep up the quality of everything I did on the series, to surround myself with the very best people and the finest scripts. It was something I had tried to do throughout my career, but now it became even more important. I simply could not let the letter-writers down, and so I replied to them all, and found myself taking on a part-time secretary to help.

  The letters came from all sorts of people, and each and every one of them was touching in its own way. Mind you, it did not entirely escape my attention that the majority of them came from women.

  One elderly lady of almost ninety years of age, who lived alone, wrote to thank me for making her Sunday evenings a treat. She told me she drew her dining table up in front of her television set before each episode, so that she could have supper with me.

  Then a young woman in her twenties wrote to ask me if I would come and meet her in a park one day, dressed as Poirot, so that she could know what it would be like to be treated like a lady. I am afraid I declined the invitation, but it revealed just how much Poirot meant to everyone that watched him.

  One lady from Northern Ireland wrote to tell me that she had never before watched films that included Poirot because he had always seemed a little unbelievable to her, and a little repellent.

  She told me that it was only because she had seen my Caliban for the RSC at Stratford that she had even turned on her television set to watch the Poirot series. To her amazement, she found him a credible character. She told me that she could see the person shining through, and asked me whether this was the fascination of acting.

  Deeply moved, I replied to her letter, though I am far from certain whether I answered her question. In fact, I am not altogether sure if I could define exactly what the fascination of acting is, beyond that I love doing it.

  Another lady, this time from Scotland, said she had felt compelled to write to congratulate me on my portrayal, and went into considerable detail about exactly why. She explained that she had always considered Poirot to be such a unique and complex character that it was impossible to bring him to life without turning him into some kind of music-hall turn. She was kind enough to tell me that, for her, my performance had come as a great surprise and a great relief. To know that these members of the audience had understood what I had been trying to do was tremendously heartening.

  Not all the letters were from ladies.

  One gentleman from Rhode Island in the United States confessed, ‘I have not had much experience in writing fan letters, so please excuse the awkwardness of this letter. I just want you to know that you have many fans in America. I am happy to say I am one of them . . . but I am not an impressionable young girl, or a yuppie or some groupie. I am a sixty-four-year-old black American, a former postal worker now retired . . . a happily married man of thirty-nine years, to my first and only love. Father of three children – two boys and a girl – and last, but not least, a grandfather of ten.’

  This delightful gentleman particularly liked Poirot’s banter with Hastings – and especially over our game of Monopoly – just as he enjoyed his impatience with the other guests during the denouement in Peril at End House, which he called ‘vintage Poirot’. But what he admired the most was the single fact that had preoccupied me the most: distilling the true humanity of the little man into my performance.

  ‘No one has so captured the essence of Poirot as you have,’ he wrote. ‘Even though you reveal his vanity, his conceits, he is in some ways a ridiculous little man, you still, like no [other] actor convey his sweetness, his innate kindness and his tenacity. It is just wonderful.’ He ended by wishing me ‘much success in your future’ and concluded with a sentence that touched my heart. ‘I hope that my letter means something to you.’ It most certainly did.

  The letter that meant the most to me, however, did not come from a fan but from Rosalind Hicks, Dame Agatha’s daughter, who had subjected me to that ordeal when we had met for lunch back in the summer of 1988, before the first series had even started filming, when she reminded me firmly that we must never laugh at Poirot – only with him.

  ‘Dear “Poirot”,’ she was kind enough to write. ‘Your appearance and mannerisms, the warmth and humour and occasional touches of impatience and fussiness – it is all just right . . . Agatha Christie’s Poirot, you certainly are. I’m sure she would have been delighted.

  ‘The order and method and the little grey cells are all there to see. The moustaches could have been a little more magnificent, but I do understand what you feel about this sensitive point!’ She ended by saying simply, ‘With many thanks and congratulations from us both.’

  It brought back the memory of my terror that my Poirot might not match the ideal she had in mind. It was an enormous relief to hear that it did.

  I think Rosalind Hicks’ support for me may have been one of the factors – as well as the audience figures in this country and the show’s success in the United States – that finally persuaded London Weekend to go on with a fourth series. After all, they were perfectly within their rights to stop, but – to their eternal credit – they did not. The decision came through while I was filming The Secret Agent, and I was thrilled.

  The success of the two-hour versions of Dame Agatha’s Peril at End House and The Mysterious Affair at Styles had apparently helped to convince executive producer Nick Elliott that there was an appetite for longer films, not least because the American audience seemed to like them. So he decided, in the first mont
hs of 1991, that they would film three two-hour specials later that year, and that, once again, he would ask Brian Eastman to produce them.

  So, in the summer of 1991, three years after that lunch with Rosalind Hicks and her husband, I went back to Twickenham Studios to film three two-hour Poirot films. There were to be one or two changes, however. My old friend Hugh Fraser was only to appear in the first of the three stories as Hastings, though Inspector Japp was in them all. The indefatigable Miss Lemon, so neatly played by Pauline Moran in the first three series, was also missing from two of the new films.

  The absence of two of my three allies made me a little sad, but the cast that Brian Eastman assembled for each of the three new films was so good that it almost made up for it, and the attention to period detail that he and London Weekend had been honing throughout the first three series was now on full display. The new films were going to look as good as British television could possibly make them – in our eyes, the equal of anything that the American networks might do.

  The first of the three was Dame Agatha’s classic The ABC Murders, called a masterpiece by many of her admirers, which features murders that are announced before they have even taken place, in letters to Poirot signed ‘ABC’. The first murder is in Andover in Hampshire, the second in Bexhill in Kent, the third in the fictional town of Cherton, possibly in Devon, and the fourth is destined to happen in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, but Poirot is determined that it will never be allowed to happen. Beside the body of each of the victims lies a copy of the English ABC Railway Guide.

  The original story began its life as a serialisation in the Daily Express in England, but the novel itself was published in both Britain and the United States in the first weeks of 1936. It was so strikingly good that it became an instant worldwide hit, and had even been made into a feature film in 1966, with the American Tony Randall as Poirot and the British actor Robert Morley as Hastings. There was even a rumour that the American comedian Zero Mostel was to have played the little Belgian in that production, but Dame Agatha, who took a great interest in any depiction of her character on the screen, objected strongly when the film’s original screenplay called for Poirot not only to have a love interest, but also a love scene. In the end, it had neither.

  Our new film had no such problems – there was not a trace of a love scene. The script was once again by the wonderful Clive Exton, and the director was Andrew Grieve, now both veterans of the series who exactly understood the character I was determined to portray.

  In fact, ABC is a delight, perhaps even my favourite Poirot film. It begins with Hastings returning from a trip to the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela, bearing a stuffed crocodile as a present for Poirot, which stands – decidedly uncomfortably – on the sideboard at Whitehaven Mansions when the first of the ‘ABC’ letters arrives. Poirot is very pleased to see his old friend, and insists he stay with him in the flat while Hastings finds himself somewhere to live, but the little man also confesses to him that he has not been very busy: ‘The little grey cells, they have the rust.’

  The cast was terrific, with Donald Sumpter particularly good as the travelling stockings salesman Alexander Bonaparte Cust, who becomes the prime suspect for the murders. For me, the scene that Donald and I played together in a jail cell is one of the highlights of all the Poirot films that I have made. When you have actors of his quality alongside you in a piece, it improves the work of everyone, and the better everyone one is, the happier I am, because it also makes me raise my own performance to match theirs. There is no competition between us as actors, just the pleasure of seeing one actor’s performance bringing out the best in all of us. It certainly did on ABC.

  The second film was Death in the Clouds, which Dame Agatha wrote in 1935, the year before ABC. Called Death in the Air in the United States, it is a prime example of one of her favourite plot devices: the victim and the potential murderers all isolated in a single location – be it in an English country house, on a train journey, on an isolated archaeological excavation in the Middle East, or – as in this case – on a flight from Le Bourget Airport in Paris to Croydon Airport to the south of London.

  It was to be directed by the actor Stephen Whittaker, who had played alongside me in Blott on the Landscape for the BBC, but had now turned director. Stephen had never directed any of our films before, and indeed nothing on quite this scale, and I think he found it quite a challenge. He was also working with a script from another newcomer to the series, the experienced British screenwriter William Humble, who had started his career writing Emmerdale.

  Nevertheless, Brian Eastman had surrounded them with another excellent cast, led by Sarah Woodward, daughter of the actor Edward Woodward, who was – effectively – my Hastings for the story. Nothing was lost by the transformation; in fact, it was a marvellous change for me to have a lady with a sharp mind as my companion rather than the ever-loyal Hastings.

  At this stage, I had no say in who was to write or direct any of the films, but I had great faith in Brian Eastman’s judgement as a producer. By now, he had a well-earned reputation for making high-quality television drama, which meant that not only did actors, writers and directors want to work with him, they also wanted to work on the Poirot series. It was his vision, and his ability to set the tone for what we were doing, that provided one of the cornerstones of the success of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. I do not believe anyone else could have ensured the production quality that Brian did, especially when it came to the cast, locations and props – not least the vintage aeroplanes and cars – or matched his eye for an interesting background to add a little glamour to the story.

  Set largely in France, which demanded a French crew alongside our English one, Death in the Clouds focuses on the death of Madame Giselle, a mysterious French moneylender, who is discovered dead during the plane’s journey from Paris to London. Not surprisingly, it also features Poirot’s fear of flying, which means that he is asleep, possibly from taking a sleeping draught, when the murder takes place. There is even a little Dame Agatha joke, as the plane’s passengers include a ‘mystery writer’ called Daniel Clancy, who becomes one of the suspects, as well as being Inspector Japp’s favourite author.

  Filmed against the backdrop of the French Open tennis championship for men in Paris in 1935, which was won by the British amateur Fred Perry, the story makes a great deal of the appetite for gambling among the plane’s occupants, particularly Lady Cicely Horbury, who is seen repeatedly losing in the casino, but it is the mystery of who killed Madame Giselle on the plane that brings the story its distinctive charm. How was she murdered, and by whom? It is one of Dame Agatha’s most intricate plots. I like working on the longer films like this one because it gives me an opportunity to develop the character, but even more than that, I thought it was wonderful that a series like ours was now capable of going to Paris, even if only for a few days. I kept pinching myself to make sure it was true. This was also the first time that I ever visited the French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s house in the Rue de Varenne, which helped me to understand the art of sculpture more completely. Ever since, I have always gone to Rodin’s house whenever I am in Paris.

  The last film in the fourth series was One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which was, in some ways, the strongest of the three. It was the first of Dame Agatha’s stories to use a nursery rhyme as its inspiration – an idea she was to return to time after time in the following thirty-five years. Written just after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, it reveals a changing world, where nothing is now quite as cosy and stable as it had been before the war intervened. There is revolution in the air, with references in the book itself both to the ‘Reds’ of the Soviet Union and ‘our Blackshirted friends’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Both appear in Clive Exton’s script for the film, which was directed by Ross Devenish, who had made such an excellent job of The Mysterious Affair at Styles two years before.

  Once again the story displays one of Poirot’s pet hates, this time of going to t
he dentist, as well as his suspicion of dentistry as a profession. It opens with a dentist’s death in his Harley Street surgery, only a matter of minutes after Poirot has left the chair. At first, the death looks like suicide, but it quickly transpires that international politics could be involved as Poirot and Chief Inspector Japp begin to investigate. A second death follows shortly afterwards, and not long after that, the character of Frank Carter, who seems to support the Fascist movement, appears.

  Carter was played by a new young actor called Christopher Eccleston, then just twenty-seven, who had made his reputation in the profession a few months earlier in the Peter Medak film Let Him Have It, about the 1953 hanging for murder of the illiterate teenager Derek Bentley, played by Eccleston. Formidably talented, Chris only had a small part in One, Two, but he was so good I could never forget him. I knew at once that here was a future star. So it proved, for he went on to confirm his reputation on television in Cracker and Doctor Who, in films with Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later, and at the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre. It gives me great pleasure to think that Poirot was there at the beginning.

  A shoe buckle certainly plays its part in Dame Agatha’s story, which also serves to remind the audience just how excellent a detective Poirot can be, as well as being someone who is exceptionally considerate towards everyone he meets, be they the English aristocracy or their servants. That allowed Clive Exton to provide Japp with a little joke at Poirot’s expense when he says, ‘You always did move in exalted circles, Poirot.’ Poirot brushes the remark off, even though he knows that it is true. Clive also allowed Poirot to confirm his principles as a detective, when he explains, ‘I am methodical, orderly and logical,’ before adding forcefully, ‘and I do not like to distort facts to support a theory.’ That was the Poirot I knew and loved, and it gave me enormous pleasure to say the line.