Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  Luckily, I was offered the role of a cold-blooded murderer in the BBC’s adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête Humaine, which had been renamed Cruel Train and set in 1940. I was to appear alongside Saskia Reeves, who had acted with me on stage in Separation, Adrian Dunbar and Minnie Driver, and the BBC’s budget was £2 million. They had even built a vast set beneath a motorway in Birmingham, which included a recreation of London’s Victoria Station and a real 1940s locomotive. It was a wonderful effort, but it did not really save the film, which was broadcast the following Easter to muted reviews.

  So the year ended on a slightly sad note, in spite of the reviews for my Sid Field and the delights of the wire-haired terrier Bob and weeks in the Lake District. What I did not know was that far worse was to come – especially for Poirot and me.

  Chapter 12

  ‘THERE HASN’T BEEN ANY TROUBLE, HAS THERE?’

  Hercule Poirot brought me so many happy memories over the years. There were times I will never, ever, forget, when the affection that the little man was held in by all kinds of ordinary people came to the surface wherever I was. Their pleasure in him was so disarming, so charming.

  There was the time when we were shooting on location in the neat little seaside town of Hastings in East Sussex, and I wanted to just take a little time away from the hustle and bustle of the unit to collect my thoughts. In full costume, complete with my Homburg and cane, I walked just round the corner into a peaceful side street to stand on my own and think about what was to come.

  Quite suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a little old lady walking slowly towards me on my side of the street, pushing one of those square shopping trolleys with four wheels, clearly on her way home. I did not say anything at all, but when she reached me, she stopped.

  ‘Hello, Monsieur Poirot,’ she said, with her head cocked to one side.

  For a moment I was at a loss to know what to say. Should I respond as Poirot? Do I respond as David Suchet? What voice should I choose?

  I made my decision.

  ‘Bonjour, madame,’ I said, sticking firmly to the little Belgian’s voice and manners.

  The little old lady smiled, and then a look of uncertainty spread slowly across her face.

  ‘There hasn’t been any trouble, has there?’ she asked, her voice aquiver. ‘I mean, there hasn’t been a murder or anything?’

  Now I really did not know what to say.

  ‘Non, non, madame. Rien. Nothing at all,’ I reassured her.

  She smiled her tiny smile again, and started off past me. But she had only gone a yard or two when she stopped and turned back.

  ‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ she said politely, ‘what are you doing in Hastings?’

  Once again, I did not know what on earth to say, but decided quickly: ‘Mes vacances, madame. I am here on holiday,’ I said in my finest Poirot.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, apparently satisfied, and set off on her way again, only to stop once again moments later.

  ‘Thank you for choosing Hastings,’ she said, with a gentle wave, and she set off up the street away from me.

  Even as I remember that day now, it brings a tear to my eye. It was so touching, and seemed to reflect exactly how much ordinary people really seemed to care about the little Belgian, even if he was entirely the product of Dame Agatha’s imagination.

  There was another wonderful moment when we were filming on location on the south coast of England, not far from Poole in Dorset, and – once again – I had slipped away from the unit to collect my thoughts.

  This time, a middle-aged couple appeared, obviously on holiday and enjoying the spring sunshine. They were arm in arm, and had clearly been married for some considerable time, because theirs was one of those relationships in which the husband says something and the wife agrees almost at once.

  Needless to say, it is the husband who spoke first.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, clearly recognising me as they passed and drawing them both to a stop. ‘I hope you don’t mind us interrupting you.’

  I smiled, and nodded encouragingly in the most appropriate Poirot manner.

  ‘Shall we tell him?’ the husband asked the wife.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Well,’ the husband said, ‘we love all your programmes. We really do. Don’t we, darling?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ his wife agreed, still smiling.

  ‘We always watch them when they come on. Don’t we?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘We never miss one. Do we?’

  ‘Oh no,’ his wife replied.

  ‘We see them all, we really do.’

  His wife was now positively beaming with pleasure. I was transfixed.

  ‘We even see the repeats. Don’t we? Whenever they come on.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And we’ve got all the box sets. Haven’t we?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  But then the husband paused for a moment, and a brief frown crossed his large, rather cheerful face. His wife’s beam also faded slightly.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ he started to say, but then hesitated and turned to his wife. ‘Shall I tell him what I said to you the other day?’

  She nodded, taking the cue of seriousness from him.

  ‘Well,’ he went on in his warm, bluff voice, ‘the thing is, you see, we love your programmes . . . but we can never understand a single word you say.’

  I really did not know what to say. I was at a complete loss for words.

  Then I smiled, as warmly as I could, before murmuring something as politely as I possibly could, before thinking to myself, ‘Talk about a letdown!’

  But then I thought about what a very long way Poirot and I had come from The Adventure of the Clapham Cook and The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim in those early days. People still loved him, even if they could not understand a single word he said.

  These wonderful moments were in my mind as I came home after making Cruel Train in Birmingham for the BBC. There was no news from London Weekend about a new Poirot series, but that was nothing unusual. I was still struggling to reconcile the success of Oleanna with the failure of What a Performance, and was wondering exactly what the future would hold for me. I was going to be fifty in a year or so, the children were growing up, and I was beginning to question what would happen to the rest of my career.

  I knew I had made the right decision to go back to the theatre, and that my television success with Poirot meant that I had developed a new theatre audience who would come and see me on the stage mainly because of the little Belgian. I also realised that he had helped me build an international reputation to go alongside my British one. Between them, Poirot and John in Oleanna had brought me offers from all sorts of different places around the world, including Hollywood.

  One thing that underlined how much Poirot had come to be loved since the series began, and I had started to play him, was the steady expansion of what was to grow into my fan club. The whole process had begun gradually a couple of years before, but it was now growing at a pace that I found quite astonishing. This was before the internet, of course, which has seen an even more amazing expansion around the world, especially, believe it or not, in Russia.

  To be honest, I was not quite sure how to react to it all, as I was a character actor playing a part, not a more conventional leading man, who would – to some extent at least – always play himself. But the amount of affection felt for Poirot was quite extraordinary.

  So I was comparatively relaxed when, at nine o’clock in the evening of New Year’s Day 1995, ITV broadcast our new version of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. It may not have been the best evening for the show, as people are generally exhausted after the exertions of New Year’s Eve – audiences tend to dip that night – but it was received well, though there were rumours afterwards that the viewing figures were not quite up to their recent levels of about ten million.

  Six weeks later, on Valentine’s Day 1995, ITV went on to s
how Hickory, Dickory, Dock, which the critics seemed to like, though again the audience did not reach quite the dizzy heights they had done.

  Perhaps I should have seen the writing on the wall because of those viewing figures. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the rumours that started to circulate that the broadcast of Murder on the Links and Dumb Witness were to be delayed, but neither worried me unduly. In spite of my decision to play in Oleanna, everything appeared to have returned to normal with the filming of the four two-hour specials. In my heart, I expected LWT to come back to me before too long with a proposal for a seventh series.

  That was a terrible mistake. One morning in the early spring of 1995, a friend rang out of the blue and said, ‘Have you seen the paper this morning?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a report that they aren’t going to make any more Poirots.’

  I was astonished. I had not heard anything about it, not a whisper, and I could hardly believe it. If they were going to cancel after more than fifty hours of television, forty-five films, nine of them two hours long, surely someone from London Weekend or ITV would have let me know – before anyone else.

  More than a little upset, I rang my agent and asked her to find out what was going on. There was no direct answer, just all sorts of prevarications over the next week or two.

  ‘A spokesman’ for LWT told the Daily Mail, ‘Talk of the sleuth’s death is premature,’ and then added, ‘No decision has been made,’ and ‘A new series is being considered but we are waiting for the go-ahead from scheduling chiefs.’ The two remaining unscreened films were left to hang in the air with no fixed transmission date.

  The truth was, of course, that the decision not to make any more series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot had been made. Maybe the drop in viewing figures was one cause; perhaps the fact that I had decided to do Oleanna had something to do with it; perhaps it was that someone at LWT felt that the series had run its course. I am not sure, and I have never been told.

  To be honest, I never expected any great ‘thank you’ from anyone at ITV, but I did feel let down – badly. It was not so much the decision itself, but the way it had been handled. No one had bothered to talk to me, and the press had discovered the truth before I had. It was hurtful.

  But I was professional enough to tell myself, and anyone who asked me about the decision, that ‘That’s show business . . . nothing lasts forever.’ I had learnt from bitter experience over the years that the only thing you can possibly do as an actor is to close the door on what you have done in the past, no matter how proud you are of it, and move on. For the moment, however, I had to turn my back on Poirot and get on with the next part of my life and career – whatever that might mean. It would be five long years before I would encounter him again.

  I ended up playing an Arab terrorist called Nagi Hassan in a £40 million Hollywood action-thriller called Executive Decision, alongside Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal and a gorgeous new young actress called Halle Berry. To be honest, the first script I saw was pretty dreadful, but, as always in Hollywood, it changed all the time, which meant that my character had at least two dimensions, even if he was not exactly a completely formed character by the time I got to play him on camera. This role meant I spent the summer of 1995 living in an extraordinary house just above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, which belonged to a rock star, and which I paid for myself. Sheila and the children remember it because it had a swimming pool that was sculpted to look like a rock pool in Shangri-La. None of us had ever seen anything like it before – in fact, I am not sure that we ever have since then. I wondered what Poirot would have made of it.

  The studio limo would arrive every morning to take me to the studio. It was an odd experience – there was none of the family feeling that there had been on our Poirot shoots. Everyone was very conscious of their status. Who had the biggest trailer, who got the special meals delivered, who was powerful enough to be late on the set – not like Poirot at all. Executive Decision was a decent-sized hit around the world, but as I was almost unrecognisable on the screen, in very dark make-up and with an Arab accent that you could cut with a knife (it was what the studio wanted). I can’t honestly say that it made a great deal of an impact on my career.

  Back home in Pinner, reality struck. There were no more Poirots, and that meant I had to look at all sorts of other opportunities. I was blessed, however, by my friends in the theatre. One in particular came to me with an offer I really could not turn down. Howard Davies, who had been an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company when I was there, asked if I would like to play the part of the henpecked academic George in Edward Albee’s dramatic masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which had been made into an international hit as a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton (as George) and Elizabeth Taylor as his viciously cruel wife, Martha. Howard had asked the incomparable Dame Diana Rigg, star of so many productions, most recently Medea in London and on Broadway, to play Martha in this new production for the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London.

  A brutal commentary on the scarred lives of a married couple in an American university who are unable to conceive a child and who invite an unknowing younger professor and his wife for dinner, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had premiered on Broadway in October 1962. At more than three hours in length, it has gone on to become one of the seminal works of the American theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. It won a Tony Award as best play in 1963, but was denied a Pulitzer Prize in that same year because of its use of swearing and overt sexuality.

  I knew it would be a huge challenge to play George, as there is not a single moment to relax for an actor during the play’s mesmerising and cathartic three acts. George is lacerated repeatedly for his weakness and stupidity by Martha, but now and again takes a bitter revenge on her. Albee’s was not a play to be taken lightly, but it was a wonderful opportunity to play a tremendous part in a truly memorable portrait of marital savagery steeped in hatred, blood and alcohol. Not only could I not refuse, I jumped at the chance. The struggle was to bring this beautifully written part off the page of Albee’s text and onto the stage.

  Albee did not make that straightforward. A famously tight-lipped playwright, who never used more words than he absolutely had to, he had come over from the United States to see the rehearsals, and came up to me after one of the final run-throughs.

  ‘Why are you playing George that way?’ he said quietly.

  ‘What way?’ I asked.

  ‘The way you’re playing him.’

  ‘Well, my interpretation is that I really do believe that you have written a love story rather than a play about two people hating each other.’

  There was a silence from Albee.

  ‘People think George is a drunk, but I think you only give him two drinks in the entire play. But it is he who pours everyone else drinks,’ I went on. ‘He is the puppet master, and he is doing what he does in order to save his marriage, to save his relationship with Martha.’

  Another silence from Albee, before he finally murmured, ‘That’s what I wrote,’ and walked out of the theatre.

  I think, and hope, I had found the poignancy and humour that he had written into the play, but which had not always emerged before. Whatever the truth, the prospect of the first production of the play in London for more than two decades attracted an enormous amount of attention, and the run at the comparatively small Almeida was sold out before the first night. As a result, it had been decided to transfer it to the larger Aldwych Theatre in central London immediately after it closed in Islington at the end of October 1996. Thankfully, the reviews at the Almeida fully justified the move. They were incredibly supportive.

  In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer was kind enough to say that I matched Diana Rigg’s volcanic performance ‘every inch of the harrowing way’, adding, ‘The sense of buried pain and humiliation is palpable.’ The Times Literary Supplement even added that the
production ‘must rank among the best’.

  The wave of enthusiasm for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among theatregoers did not wane for one moment when we transferred to the Aldwych on 30 October 1996. With quotations on the advertising saying, ‘One of the theatrical sensations of the year’ and ‘Masterpiece’, we were to play there for almost five months, to incredibly receptive audiences.

  Time magazine even came over from the United States in February 1997, to say that we brought out ‘all the lacerating power and poignancy of Albee’s depiction of the blasted American dream’. My performance won me the Critics’ Circle Award for best actor and saw me nominated for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actor. By the time we finally closed on 22 March 1997, I was exhausted.

  Several potential film projects fell apart around me, but that allowed me to spend the school summer holidays with Sheila, Robert and Katherine, the first time I had managed to do that in what seemed like years, as I had been filming Poirot in the summer so often. Then I was offered the leading role in a drama for Scottish Television, another part of ITV, separate from London Weekend, though it had been commissioned by my old Poirot colleague Nick Elliott. It was a part that could not have been further away from the little man.

  In a three-part drama called Seesaw, that was to be broadcast in the early spring of 1998, I was to play an affluent and successful north London husband and father, Morris Price, in a contemporary drama which sees his seventeen-year-old daughter kidnapped. Morris had made his money selling security equipment, while his wife Val, to be played by my old friend Geraldine James, who had appeared with me in Blott on the Landscape, had been an interior designer. Written by Deborah Moggach, who adapted her own original novel, the story has my character being asked to pay £500,000 in ransom for the return of his daughter, Hannah.

  It was as close a role to me in reality as I had played in many years – Morris was about my age, fifty-two, had a wife and two children, as I had, and there was to be no padding, no beard, wig or funny moustache. It was the first time in many years that I had appeared on television without wearing some kind of disguise. It also forced me to confront my own worst fears. What if it had happened to my own daughter, Katherine, who was then just fourteen? I only knew one thing: that I would give up my life for my child. Morris decides not to tell the police and sells his business to pay the ransom.