Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  In fact, I had first been offered the role while I was playing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it had taken some time to pull the production together, and so we did not actually film it until six months or so after I had finished in the West End. I was very flattered because I had heard that when Geraldine was offered the role of the wife, she said she would only do it if I played the husband, which, thank goodness, ITV had already decided that I should. It was a delight to work with her again so long after Blott, where I played her cook, chauffeur and handyman – although we ended up getting married. This time, we were married from the start, which we both found incredibly easy and straightforward. After all, we had done it before.

  Seesaw played on successive Thursday evenings in March 1998 and both the audience and the critics seemed to like it. But I hardly had a moment to notice, as I was whisked off to Los Angeles immediately after the filming had finished, and before it was broadcast, to play the lead detective in a remake of Frederick Knott’s famous stage play Dial M for Murder, which had been so memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. This time, the stars were to be Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, while I was to play the part originally made famous by the great British character actor John Williams. In the original play and film, the plot took place in London, but this time the husband’s scheme to commit the perfect crime by killing his wife was to take place in New York. The producers had also decided it should be called A Perfect Murder.

  The experience of making Executive Decision in 1995 and now A Perfect Murder convinced me that making movies in Hollywood is not quite like anything else. The new movie’s producers invited me to New York, where we had breakfast together.

  Without any warning, they announced, almost in unison, ‘We’re so pleased that you can speak Arabic.’

  I was a little puzzled. ‘What makes you think that?’ I said, as I sipped my orange juice.

  ‘Well, you spoke it so brilliantly in Executive Decision.’

  When I told them that I was terribly sorry but I did not, in fact, speak any Arabic at all, they paused for a moment.

  ‘You don’t? Gee. Well, at least you look Arabic.’ I was left pretty much speechless.

  The Hollywood reality is that it is the stars that sell the tickets. There famous adage ‘Put the money on the screen’ means that if the audience pays to see Michael Douglas, then they want to see as much of him in the film as they possibly can, from the very opening scene until the end, because that way, they are getting what they paid for.

  It is the perfect reflection of that other old Hollywood adage, ‘The thing about show business is that the second word is business.’ Stars bring in an audience, and so they are the vital ingredient for moviegoers, wherever they may be in the world. They keep the film business flowing. For a British character actor brought up in the democratic traditions of the Royal Shakespeare Company, that can be a hard lesson to learn, but it is an important one.

  Making A Perfect Murder proved it to me. Even though my part as the lead detective was vital to the plot – and I shot any number of scenes to prove it – when the final version of the film emerged, I seemed to have disappeared onto the cutting-room floor. But then came an unexpected consolation. When the studio tested a first cut of the film at previews in the United States, they discovered that the audiences there wanted to see rather more of my character. So, four months after shooting was finished, they flew Gwyneth Paltrow and an entire set over from the States, erected it at Pinewood in England, and filmed the final scene in the film as it was eventually released.

  After that, it was with some relief that I went back to work in the theatre, to play the family patriarch and gentleman’s outfitter Don Peppino Priore in the Italian Eduardo de Filippo’s splendid comedy Saturday, Sunday, Monday at the Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex, for a six-week season. My wife was to be played by the Irish actress Dearbhla Molloy. Entirely set in my character’s house in Naples, and one of the great plays of the Italian theatre in the twentieth century, it was a joy after the darkness of both Oleanna and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It put a positive spring in my step throughout the spring and early summer of 1998.

  But then, over the horizon, came the faintest sight of the little Belgian who had not been a part of my life for the past three years. Rumours started flying about that London Weekend and ITV were thinking of reviving Poirot for some two-hour specials, to be filmed in 1999. In my heart, I had never buried him, and now he might actually be coming back.

  Chapter 13

  ‘I HAD FORGOTTEN HOW HARD HE WAS TO FIND IN THE FIRST PLACE’

  Before Poirot could make his reappearance in my life, however, the theatre intervened once again. The producer Kim Poster came to me with a proposal that I appear as the Viennese composer Antonio Salieri in a new production of Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s masterpiece about the life of Mozart. It tells the story of Salieri’s jealousy of Mozart’s extraordinary talent when he arrives at the court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria in 1781. Salieri tries everything in his power to thwart the young man’s success, and does so from a mixture of pride, envy and greed.

  Peter Hall had been the play’s first director in 1979, when it had its world premiere at the National Theatre in London, and then transferred to the West End with Paul Scofield as Salieri and Simon Callow as Mozart. After transferring to Broadway, it was then turned into a film in 1984 by the Czech director Milos Forman, which not only won him the Oscar for best film of the year, but also won F. Murray Abraham the Oscar for best actor for playing Salieri.

  I did not hesitate. I accepted Kim’s offer, not least because Peter Shaffer felt that there was a great deal that could be added to the play now. Before rehearsals began I went to Peter to ask him how he wanted the audience to feel about my character Salieri. He felt that the audience should feel he was cruel to Mozart but also feel sorry for him that he could not control his jealousy towards the young composer, no matter how hard he tried. In the original version, Salieri was a delicious part in a superb play about the beauty of great music and the dark passions that so often lie behind it, but during our rehearsals Peter continued to rewrite and added a sense of humour, almost of pathos, to Salieri.

  The fiercely Welsh young actor Michael Sheen, then just twenty-nine, who would go on to make an international reputation on film and television playing the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and interviewer Sir David Frost, was to play Mozart opposite me. The idea was that we would do a short tour of the British Isles in September and early October 1998, before bringing the play to London. When Amadeus opened at the Old Vic on Wednesday, 21 October 1998, the national critics seemed impressed. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, called it ‘highly theatrical, superbly directed by Peter Hall’. But some had their reservations about Peter Shaffer’s rewrite. Charles Spencer, in the Daily Telegraph, said, ‘This is a play that takes a profound subject but has very little profound to say about it: a second rate drama, in fact, about what it feels like just to be second rate,’ although he added that it was a ‘cracking night out’.

  Kim Poster wanted to build on our British success by taking the play to Broadway immediately, but by then, Brian Eastman had come back to me with a firm plan to make two two-hour Poirot films, and I had committed to them. Kim kindly agreed that she would wait for me to finish the Poirot filming, and would then take our Amadeus to Broadway as soon possible afterwards.

  After the run ended in London I went to Spain to play Napoleon in a film, but once that was over I was free to return to England and Poirot, and so, almost five years to the day after the joys of Dumb Witness, in the early summer of 1999, I walked back onto the set in my spats and homburg hat, to appear in a new two-hour television version of one of Dame Agatha’s most famous Poirot stories, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

  The production team had changed a little. The American Arts & Entertainment network had come in to replace London Weekend as the major production company putting up the mo
ney and then selling the programmes to ITV, but Brain Eastman was still there as the producer, and Clive Exton was still writing some of the screenplays. Hugh Fraser and Pauline Moran were not there, because neither Hastings nor Miss Lemon appeared in the story, but Philip Jackson was there again as the indefatigable Inspector Japp.

  No matter how pleased I may have been to return to playing Poirot, I had nevertheless profoundly underestimated how much I needed to remind myself about him after five years away. I had forgotten how hard he was to find in the first place – his walk, his mannerisms, how he thinks, and so on. In the first seven years that I played him, he had gradually become more and more like a comfortable glove that I could slip on and off whenever I wanted to. But now, after a five-year break, the glove had got a bit stiff in the cupboard and did not slip on quite so easily.

  To make sure I recaptured him exactly as he had been, I watched several hours from the previous forty-five Poirot films we had made before I set foot on the set of Roger Ackroyd. I wanted to make absolutely sure that the audience did not detect any differences. And as I watched them, I was reminded of his vain, pernickety, idiosyncratic – and sometimes infuriating – habits, as well as his natural charm and kindness, particularly to servants and those less capable of defending themselves.

  The experience sharpened the feeling that had been growing within me for some time, that I really wanted to complete every single one of the Poirot stories on film, all the way until his final story, Curtain, in which he dies.

  Wisely, Brian Eastman and Clive Exton had decided to make the most of Poirot’s absence from the screen for so long by starting this first film after five years with him growing marrows in the garden of his small cottage in the English village of King’s Abbott. He had not been at Whitehaven Mansions for some considerable time, and was, theoretically at least, in retirement. I must say, I had one or two reservations about the pretty silly gardening clothes I had to wear in my first appearance on the screen with the marrows. I was sure Poirot would never have dressed that way, but I kept my own counsel for once – it was only one scene, after all.

  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a wonderful story, and the one that firmly established Dame Agatha as a best-selling crime writer, while at the same time ensuring that Poirot became one of the leading fictional detectives of the time. She wrote it in 1925, at the age of thirty-five, and it was published in the spring of the following year to considerable acclaim, although some readers felt she had ‘not quite played fair’ with them in her choice of murderer in the plot. They felt it was a little underhand, but Dame Agatha herself firmly disagreed.

  Roger Ackroyd became Dame Agatha’s – and Poirot’s – first major success, selling more than 5,000 copies in hardcover in Britain alone in its first year. One reason for this, I suspect, is that it assembles one of the most ingenious group of suspects in all her murder-mysteries, and even has the murderer narrate the story, without giving his or her identity away. It was an idea said to have been given to Dame Agatha by Lord Louis Mountbatten, although she also credited her brother-in-law, James Watts, with coming up with the same idea – of a murderer describing the crime.

  The story also allows Poirot to reveal his dislike of the countryside, in spite of his retiring there from London. ‘There are more jealousies and rivalries than Ancient Rome,’ Clive Exton has him say at one point in the film, describing country life, before adding, ‘I thought I could escape the wickedness of the city.’ Japp is only too pleased to see him, however, confiding solemnly, with his hang-dog expression and sad eyes, ‘Bit like old times eh?’

  One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dame Agatha’s original story is that one of the characters, the busybody Caroline, is said to have been the inspiration for her other principal detective, Miss Marple, who would appear in 1930 in her very first mystery, Murder at the Vicarage.

  Directed by Andrew Grieve, I had the highest hopes for our new Roger Ackroyd – the story was terrific, the location was excellent, the sets were good, the cast strong. And yet, somehow, after we had finished, I felt it lacked something. I am not sure exactly why; perhaps it had something to do with my expectations being too high. The denouement was exciting and unexpected – it should have been marvellous, but somehow, there was something missing.

  Interestingly, there had been several other attempts to make The Murder of Roger Ackroyd work – on film and on stage – and they too had struggled a little, somehow never quite matching the supreme moments of Dame Agatha’s novel itself.

  A stage version, adapted from the novel by Michael Morton and called Alibi, was produced on the West End stage in May 1928 by the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier and starred Charles Laughton as Poirot. It was a decent, but not overwhelming, success and was certainly nothing to rival the phenomenal success of Dame Agatha’s The Mousetrap a quarter of a century later. A film version, also called Alibi, appeared in 1931, with Austin Trevor as Poirot, but it too failed to set the box office alight, and when Laughton took the London stage production to New York in 1932, once again playing Poirot, it closed after just twenty-four performances.

  Publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd coincided with a painful period of Agatha Christie’s life, as her marriage to Colonel Archie Christie was coming to an end. They eventually divorced in 1928, and within two years, she had found real happiness in her second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was fourteen years younger than she. In the wake of her divorce, she had decided to take a holiday by herself in the autumn of 1929, with a journey on the Orient Express train from Calais to Istanbul. From there, she had then gone on to visit an archaeological dig not far from Baghdad. She eventually went home, but the following March, she made the journey to the site again, this time mainly by sea, where she met Mallowan, who had been away with appendicitis on her first visit. The couple travelled back to England together on the Orient Express and, shortly afterwards, he proposed to her.

  I find it very romantic that Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie married on 11 September 1930, in a small church in Edinburgh, and then took off on the Orient Express once again for their honeymoon.

  Her new husband’s occupation was to form part of the central inspiration for her work in the years to come. Within a year, they were back on an archaeological dig, once again not far from Baghdad, at a place called Nineveh. It was there, in the autumn of 1931, that she began writing the Poirot story Lord Edgware Dies, which was published in the spring of 1933 in Britain and shortly afterwards in the United States, where it was called Thirteen at Dinner. The story was dedicated to one of Max Mallowan’s archaeologist colleagues at Nineveh and his wife.

  It was this story that was the second of the two-hour films that Brian Eastman and I went on to make in the summer of 1999, and it was a very strange experience. As you may remember, I had appeared in a film version of it before, a made-for-television movie in 1985, which starred Peter Ustinov as Poirot. I had played Inspector Japp, in one of the worst performances I think I have ever given in my life, although Peter kindly suggested to me that I might make a good Poirot myself. Peter was such a nice, entertaining man; I remember him with enormous affection.

  When we started filming Lord Edgware Dies at Twickenham, memories of playing Japp came flooding back, even though our two films were quite different. Another old Poirot hand, Anthony Horowitz, had written a script that continued the theme of Poirot’s return from retirement that Clive Exton had set up in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. There was even a celebratory supper for him at Whitehaven Mansions, attended by Japp, Hastings and Miss Lemon – after Hastings’ sudden return from the Argentine, leaving his new wife there alone. As Anthony has Japp say at the reunion, with just a hint of irony, ‘Here we are, the four of us together again. There is only one thing missing – the body.’ It takes almost no time for one to appear: Lord Edgware’s.

  Part of Dame Agatha’s inspiration for the story came from seeing an American entertainer called Ruth Draper in London in the 1920s. ‘I t
hought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were,’ she wrote in her autobiography, and our television version of the story unfolds around Miss Lemon persuading Poirot and Hastings to go and see a similar act. But when it came to the denouement of the story, and Poirot’s revelation of the murderer, I found it very difficult indeed not to think of how Peter Ustinov had done it in our American film together. He had made it very funny, and I could not quite get that out of my mind, even though I was determined to stick to my own version of the little man, which I eventually managed to do. What made the difference finally, and allowed me to keep the memory of Peter at bay, was that as the years had passed, I had grown steadily more confident in playing Poirot, and now rediscovering him gave me the courage to play him with a little more gravitas. Unlike Peter’s version, my Poirot was a man to be taken seriously, no matter how idiosyncratic he may have appeared.

  No sooner had I finished filming than I was back in Peter Hall’s hands for the American production of Amadeus, once again opposite Michael Sheen as Mozart. We were due to open at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on 5 October 1999 and then at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway on 16 December. It meant that I would be spending the end of the Millennium away from home, but the play was so special, it made up for it.

  The Los Angeles opening went well, though Variety wondered whether the film version had rather sated the appetite for it among theatregoers in California, concluding, ‘Shaffer’s stage play seems, well, superfluous.’ Not everyone agreed. The Hollywood Reporter suggested Peter Shaffer had made a ‘very good play . . . even better’ and kindly described my performance as ‘thrilling’, although the Los Angeles Times also wondered whether there was really an appetite for Amadeus again in the wake of the Oscar-winning film.