by David Suchet
My daughter, Katherine, appeared in One, Two, as a schoolgirl in the park. She and Sheila happened to be on set one day, when we needed some extras. It was not the only time one or both of the children worked alongside me. A few years later, they were extras in a Tube train segment, only to find that, when the episode finally aired, they had been left on the cutting-room floor. They were very miffed.
After the filming was over, Sheila and I, as well as Robert and Katherine, who were then ten and eight, took off on holiday in our new narrow boat, called Lark Rise. It was our second boat, after Prima Donna, which had been our first home together and the one we lived on while we toured in rep. We paid all the proper charges for moorings, but even so, narrow boats make wonderful ‘digs’ for touring actors because they provide an economical place to live and you can usually find a mooring not too far from the theatre. This time, we toured our old haunts, the canals of the Midlands, hiding away from everyone and enjoying being a family together. I had been so busy, it was a relief to be alone with the people I cared most about in the world, away from the pressure.
I knew in my heart that we had done a good job with our latest three films – they felt right somehow. But that series also underlined something that was very important to me in the wake of all those letters: the fact that it contradicted the rule that seemed to say that even very good television series begin to fall off after a while, as their quality seems to dilute. I was delighted that our Poirot films had not done that.
The only shadow on the horizon, as we travelled the canals, was that my dear, dear mother Joan, who’d been a dancer alongside Evelyn Laye in the 1922 musical hit Lilac Time, before she married my father Jack, was not well again. There had been difficulties over the past few years, but as 1992 began, I was beginning to become very worried about her indeed. To be an actor is wonderful, but there is nothing more important than family.
Chapter 10
‘I COULD BE SAYING GOODBYE TO HIM, PERHAPS FOR A YEAR, PERHAPS FOREVER’
What I feared might happen turned into a bleak reality not long after we came back from our family trip on Lark Rise along England’s canals. My dear mum had gone into hospital for a hip operation just before Christmas, but some time after she came out of the anaesthetic, a blood embolism sent her into a deep coma, which began on New Year’s Eve 1991. She came out of the coma in February, but the doctors told us that she would simply never be the same again, and on 5 May 1992 she died, at the age of just seventy-six, with her three sons, John, Peter and me, at her bedside.
It was a horrible and protracted death, which was very hard on her, and, of course, on all the rest of the family. Going to visit her was a dreadful ordeal, as we all knew she simply could not survive, and yet we all wanted her to. I do not think that John, Peter and I, her three sons, ever imagined living without her.
Yet, even then, at this dark point in my life, it was as if the ghost of Dame Agatha was looking over my shoulder. At the very moment we heard of my mother’s descent into a coma, Sheila and I were staying at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, the place that was one of the inspirations for some of Dame Agatha’s stories. She was, of course, born in the town and her house, Greenway, was not far away, on the River Dart in south Devon.
I was devastated. My mother had meant so much to me. Without her support, I would never have become an actor. It was she who persuaded my father to let me go to drama school – very much against his will. In fact, she became a legend at LAMDA when I was a student there, turning up to watch me whenever there was a public performance. In one play I appeared in, my character had to call out for his mother at the start of the second act, which, of course, I did – only for my mother to call out ‘Yes!’ from the stalls. We had to start the second act again.
Mum also developed a technique for letting me know that she and my father were in the audience, by coughing loudly in my first dramatic pause in the production. Throughout every single day of my career, she was a wonderful source of encouragement, though she could be strange from time to time. When I was playing Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew at Exeter on one occasion, I got a message to come to the telephone to speak to my mother while the production was going on.
My grandmother was ill at the time and I assumed it was about her, so I said, ‘Is Nana all right?’ There was a pause from my mother. ‘I mean, I’m worried about her.’
Another pause, then my mother said, ‘When you take your lovely feathered hat off, will you straighten your hair? You’re looking bald.’
Mum always came to my dressing room after seeing one of my performances, and always worried about me, and that went on even after I was married to Sheila. I knew in my heart that I would not even have got my first job as an actor without her, let alone Poirot. The two of them made such a difference to me that I honestly do not think I could have survived in the profession without them.
My mother was so devoted to my career that she came to see every play that I performed on the stage. In fact, there was one occasion, when I was playing Bolingbroke in Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, when they even held up the rise of the curtain for her, so that she could get to her seat before we started the performance. That was how much she meant to me, and to my colleagues. She was so proud of everything I had done. My one consolation after her death was that at least she had seen my career blossom.
The moment my mother’s funeral was over, I flew to Morocco to film the first of the eight films in the latest, fifth, Poirot series.
I cannot say that I was exactly ready to start filming. In fact, I found it very difficult indeed to climb back into my padding and my false moustaches as the little Belgian. My mother’s death was in my mind at every moment, and I struggled to forget her as I put on the spats and picked up Poirot’s silver-topped cane again. Looking back, I do not think that I was ever quite myself throughout this series, because of the long shadow cast by her death. But I did everything in my power to honour her memory and remain as professional as she had always wanted me to be.
My mother’s death may have been the subconscious reason behind the fact that I collapsed during the filming of the first story in the new series, The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb. It had never happened before. I was sitting in an open-topped car in the burning sun, without an umbrella to protect me, as we filmed a series of takes of Poirot arriving at a local police station. It was very hot, and getting hotter – and my padding was not helping.
To this day, I am not exactly sure what happened. All I know is that the car pulled up outside the police station on one of the takes, I went to climb out, and everything went black. I do not remember anything else at all until I woke up indoors, lying flat on my back, and found myself being given oxygen through a mask by the unit’s nurse. Apparently, I had fallen down in a dead faint.
The only thing I remember clearly as I came round was the sight of one of the production team looking at his watch, worrying that we still had a lot to shoot that day and could not afford to waste any time. Such is an actor’s destiny.
The story was clearly inspired by the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun by the English Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922. News of the find first appeared only a year or so before Dame Agatha’s own story appeared in the Daily Sketch. It was later to be included in the collection Poirot Investigates, published in 1924. There could be no doubt about her inspiration. All the ingredients of King Tut’s curse are there – right down to the discovery of a lost Egyptian tomb and the ancient curse that is destined to fall on anyone who dares open it.
Dame Agatha’s version tells of a series of deaths following the discovery and opening of the tomb of King Men-her-Ra by British archaeologist Sir John Willard – who dies of what appears to be a heart attack at the very moment the tomb is opened. His widow is convinced that there has been foul play and consults Poirot, who finds himself, before long, on his way to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt – although, in our case, Morocco was standing in for the original.
Poirot appears to take the legend of the curse seriously, even saying to Hastings and Miss Lemon at one point, ‘I also believe in the force of superstition – it is a power that is very great indeed.’ He is, of course, talking about the power of the idea of superstition, rather than the curse itself, for Poirot always relies on logic.
Fortunately, the next story in the series was to be filmed in England, so I had a chance to recover in a rather more temperate climate. Dame Agatha wrote The Underdog in 1928, but it was not published in England until 1960, when it appeared as one of the stories in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. Our new version was written by a newcomer to the series, Bill Craig, who set it around a golf match, but, more significantly, it begins with Miss Lemon attempting to hypnotise Poirot using her new-found skill as a hypnotherapist. The therapy does not work with the little man, although it does play its part in the story.
The only thing I did not care for about the plot was the notion that Poirot might like to play golf. I simply did not agree. I can remember saying to the production team, ‘Poirot does not play golf. He simply would not.’ To my mind, he would always be perfectly happy to watch Hastings play – and indeed he takes some delight in the fact that his friend scores a hole in one, to the amazement of everyone, at the end of the story – but my Poirot would always prefer to watch.
The Underdog was one of Dame Agatha’s slighter stories, but the next in the series, The Yellow Iris was one of her strongest. It had first appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1937 and was later published in a collection called The Regatta Mystery in 1939. But the screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, expanded the story considerably, giving it a flashback sequence in Buenos Aires and adding the idea that this was a crime that Poirot had once failed to solve. Directed by Peter Barber-Fleming, it focuses on a restaurant called Le Jardin des Cygnes in Argentina and the intervention of a corrupt Argentinean general to prevent Poirot solving a murder there. Still smarting at the failure, Poirot seizes the chance two years later to reclaim his reputation when a new restaurant opens in London with exactly the same name, and where exactly the same group of characters that had been in Buenos Aires are reunited.
The story includes another of Dame Agatha’s poisonings, and takes place almost entirely in the restaurant, which also features a cabaret with a singer, just as the original short story did, though she does not sing the lines written for her by Dame Agatha.
Thinking about The Yellow Iris now, it reminds me that her greatest fans sometimes object when we depart from her original story in the television films – and they write to tell me so. I always reply by telling them that I am terribly sorry, but not all of her stories adapt easily to the small screen, they are simply too slight, which is why we describe them as ‘based on’ her originals. I think her die-hard fans forgive us for the adaptations, but I do understand how they feel.
The next two films, The Case of the Missing Will and The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman, were both stories that originally appeared in the Daily Sketch and were later published in Poirot Investigates, in 1924. Neither were tremendously strong stories, and both needed more than a little adaptation to make the transition to television.
What was most interesting to me about these stories was that, at this point in Poirot’s history, Dame Agatha was carefully developing his character, not only to allow her readers to discover his foibles, but also for them to grasp a sense of his beliefs. This is true of The Case of the Missing Will in particular, where one of the characters is a staunch feminist who believes that women should have the right to a university education, something Poirot wholeheartedly agrees with.
When I first started reading Poirot, I relied on these early stories to help me to understand him better, which was lucky for me, for as time went by and her audience grew to know him better, she reduced the amount of time she spent revealing his idiosyncrasies. By then, her audience had come to know them only too well.
The sixth film was one of my favourites, and remains so to this day. The Chocolate Box, which was originally known as The Clue of the Chocolate Box, first appeared in the Daily Sketch in 1923 and was then collected in Poirot Investigates. It is a simply wonderful story about Poirot’s return to Brussels with Inspector Japp – the Scotland Yard detective is to receive a grand award – which reminds Poirot of a case when he was still an officer in the Belgian detective force. In the original story, Poirot’s reminiscence is told in flashback, and the screenwriter, Douglas Watkinson again, had Philip Jackson and I travel to Brussels together to launch the story.
That made it very special for me. It was wonderful to go to Belgium, because I truly felt that I was returning to my homeland as Poirot. By then, I had discovered that he was born in the town of Spa in the principality of Liège, sometime between 1854 and 1856, and the film gave me the opportunity to unveil his character as a younger man and reveal something about his past. Just as exciting was the fact that I was to be dressed in a police uniform for the flashbacks in the 1890s, which allowed me to escape my padding, and even to renounce the walk I had used for so long playing him as an older man – remember, he was in his middle sixties when he was first discovered in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
The story also gave me the chance to show Poirot’s emotional side, for as part of the film, he loses his heart to a young woman, Mademoiselle Virginie Mesnard, who asks him to investigate a case of what may be murder, but is being called a natural death by the doctors. Virginie was played by the lovely Anna Chancellor, then still just twenty-seven, the year before she leapt to prominence as Henrietta, or ‘Duckface’, as she was known, in Richard Curtis’s award-winning film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Then still in her bohemian period, Anna was quite superb in our film, bewitching the younger Poirot completely, and presenting him with the tiny silver vase for his lapel that he wore filled with wild flowers from that day onwards.
In fact, that never happened in Dame Agatha’s original story, but was another example of the screenwriter allowing Poirot an opportunity to display rather more of himself to the audience on television than he did in the original story. Filming it made me truly happy, for there was Poirot as a younger man, pursuing the case against the wishes of his superiors, losing his heart to Virginie, even running through the streets of Brussels – not something the older Hercule Poirot would ever have allowed himself to do. It was a breath of fresh air, and a joy to do.
Anna’s was not the only memorable performance in The Chocolate Box, for the director, Andrew Grieve, also had the incomparable Rosalie Crutchley playing an elderly matriarch. Then in her early seventies, Rosalie was a legend of both British films and television, having played Acte alongside Peter Ustinov’s Nero in the 1951 epic Quo Vadis and Madame Defarge in the 1958 version of A Tale of Two Cities, alongside Dirk Bogarde. She had even played Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, in not one but two television series in the early 70s.
With her olive complexion and sad, dark eyes, Rosalie was capable of commanding the screen while doing almost nothing. As an actor, you simply could not ignore her strength, which communicated itself to the audience almost subliminally. She was superb in our film, though sadly she was to die only five years later, at the age of just seventy-seven. One of the delights of the filming was that I managed to photograph both Rosalie and Anna during breaks in the shooting, as I had begun to return to my old hobby of photography in what few spare moments I had.
Sadly, the last two films of our fifth series were not quite of the same exquisite quality as The Chocolate Box.
Dead Man’s Mirror was a long short story that had first appeared in book form in a collection called Murder in the Mews in 1937, although it was, in fact, an expanded version of another of her stories, The Second Gong, which was first published in the magazines Ladies’ Home Journal and the Strand in 1932. A locked room mystery – another of Dame Agatha’s favourite plot devices – it centres on a rather pompous collector of Art Deco who outbids Poirot for a mirror at a London auction an
d then asks to consult him because he suspects that he is being defrauded by his architect. Poirot visits him – only for the collector to be found dead, in what looks like suicide, locked in his study. The striking of the gong which calls the house guests down to dinner plays a significant role in the denouement, but it is a gentle story rather than one to set the blood racing.
The same could also be said for Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan, another of the short stories from the Daily Sketch to be collected for Poirot Investigates. The original title was The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls, which is a rather more accurate indication of the story, as it focuses on a theatre producer who purchases some expensive jewels at auction for his wife, who is an actress, to wear in his production of a new play called Pearls Before Swine. Poirot only gets involved because he has been forced to take a holiday due to overwork and finds himself in Brighton, staying at the Grand Metropolitan Hotel, together with the producer and his wife, at the time the play has its premiere. The jewels go missing, encouraging Poirot to overcome his illness to recover them.
In the original story, the pearls were purchased by a rich stockbroker ‘who made a fortune in the recent oil boom’, but the screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, turned him into a theatrical producer, thereby allowing the denouement to take place in a theatre, a place that Dame Agatha used several times in her stories, although not in this one in its original version. Filmed in Brighton, it used another of her favourite devices – how the pearls could have disappeared from a locked box when the maid who was guarding them never let the box out of her sight. Another slight story, it lacked the energy and force of The Yellow Iris and The Chocolate Box.