by David Suchet
In New York, the reviews were equally mixed. Some wondered whether the play no longer really held up in the wake of the film. Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, was unimpressed by my Salieri, preferring Michael Sheen’s Mozart, but many others seemed to like us both, with Newsday calling it ‘extravagantly enjoyable, even more satisfying than the original’. The legendary New York critic Clive Barnes described it as ‘a thoughtful yet immensely enjoyable play’.
The audiences seemed to agree, and I was nominated for a Critics’ Circle Award in Los Angeles, as well as an Outer Critics’ Circle Award in New York and a ‘Tony’ nomination. Every bit as thrilling, however, was the fact that I also received a handwritten letter from Milos Forman – the Czech director who had turned Amadeus into an eight-Oscar, four-BAFTA and four-Golden Globe-winning masterpiece of the cinema – congratulating me on my performance.
At the end of May 2000, I packed my bags for London to become Poirot once again, but before I went anywhere near a television studio, Sheila and I were whisked off to Japan as guests of the country’s biggest broadcaster, NHK, with its one hundred million viewers. Agatha Christie’s Poirot was one of their most successful series and Sheila and I found ourselves treated like visiting diplomats when we arrived in Tokyo. There were limousines everywhere and a great many red carpets.
Even out of costume, everyone in Japan seemed to know who I was, and I was interviewed on all the main news bulletins. It was then that I started to explain in public that one of my great ambitions was to film every one of Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories, in a body of work that would be unique for television. I told several of the Japanese interviewers that Poirot’s life had a definite beginning, middle and end, which I very much wanted to portray on the screen. I wanted to bring Dame Agatha’s canon of work about him to a close with Poirot’s last case, Curtain.
The trip to Japan brought home to me that Agatha Christie’s Poirot had become one of Britain biggest television exports, overtaking even previous record-holders like Inspector Morse. Some experts claimed that more than one billion viewers had watched the series around the world, in countries as diverse as Estonia, Lithuania, Korea, Egypt, Brazil, Angola, Iceland, Mauritius, Iran, Singapore, China, and, of course, Japan; though I should say at once that I do not believe that Sheila and I had quite realised that until we were ushered regally around Japan that summer.
It was something of a shock to come back to reality in England, and then be shipped off to Tunisia in the heat of summer to make the first of a second set of two two-hour specials for the Arts & Entertainments network, this time Dame Agatha’s Murder in Mesopotamia. The original novel was published in 1936, and was partly written while she was there with her new husband. Given her second marriage to Max Mallowan, it was hardly surprising that Dame Agatha had begun to set some of her stories around archaeological digs in the desert of the Middle East, in what was to become Iraq and Syria. Her novel was dedicated to ‘my many archaeological friends’.
Directed by the Lancashire-born director Tom Clegg, who was in his sixties and had never worked on Agatha Christie’s Poirot before, but was a veteran of the British television series Sharpe, it was written by Clive Exton, and once again he made one or two changes to Dame Agatha’s original story. In particular, he made Hastings a part of the mystery, even though he never appeared in the original novel, and he also made Poirot rather less enamoured of the desert than he had been in the book itself, where the events were said to have taken place after he had been ‘disentangling some military scandal in Syria’. In our film, Clive took another liberty with the original in making Poirot’s reason for being in Baghdad an invitation from none other than the exotic and mysterious Countess Rossakoff, who had played no part whatever in Dame Agatha’s original story.
One other interesting point struck me as we began filming. At the end of the original novel, Poirot leaves for Syria again, only to find himself ‘mixed up’ in another murder, this time on the Orient Express on his way home. Dame Agatha’s famous mystery about those events was actually published two years before Murder in Mesopotamia, in 1934, but the link between the two is unmistakable.
Our location in Tunisia was a real archaeological dig, and the cast of extras working on the site seemed positively enormous. The murder victim is the wife of the expedition’s leader, Dr Eric Leidner, who is surrounded by Dame Agatha’s customary collection of idiosyncratic characters, all of whom may have had a motive for the killing his wife. Once again, there is a locked-room element to the mystery, as well as elements of ‘time-shifting’, one of Dame Agatha’s favourite plot devices. The denouement is also one of the longest in the whole series, and may have added to the slightly slow pace of the film, but the location added a very particular glamour.
Back in London, we started on the second of the two-hour films in this eighth series, Evil Under the Sun. Written when Dame Agatha was working two days a week in the dispensary at University College Hospital in London, in the early days of the war, where she was known as Mrs Mallowan rather than Mrs Christie, it was published in 1941 to great acclaim. The Times Literary Supplement in particular applauded it, saying that ‘It will take a lot of beating . . . she springs her secret like a landmine,’ while the Daily Telegraph was even more complimentary, suggesting that Dame Agatha has ‘never written anything better’ and calling it ‘detective story writing at its best’.
It is certainly a fine story and it did bring our film one great advantage – it was to be shot at the extraordinary Burgh Island Hotel, built by an eccentric millionaire called Archibald Nettlefold on a tiny island just off the south Devon coast, not far from Kingsbridge. It is one of the finest Art Deco hotels in England, complete with its own motorised sea-tractor to take its guests to and from the mainland. That meant that I spent a very happy few days there in September 2000, in the midst of some of the most beautiful seaside scenery in the country.
The screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, once again took the occasional small liberty with Dame Agatha’s original story. In the novel, Poirot is just taking a few days’ rest from Whitehaven Mansions, but in our version, he is taken ill at a new restaurant that Captain Hastings has backed in London, partly on the basis of his experiences in Argentina, called El Ranchero. But when he and Hastings arrive at the Sandy Cove Health Resort, as we renamed the Burgh Island Hotel, the original story and our new version came together again.
The story is about a famous actress called Arlena Stuart, who is also a guest on the island. Poirot immediately fears that a murder may be committed, not least because so many of the other guests seem to dislike her intensely. ‘There is evil everywhere under the sun,’ Poirot says carefully when one guest remarks what a beautiful day it is on the coast, and he tries to prevent the murder, but without success. The actress’s body is discovered on the beach and the denouement reveals a supremely complex plot that allows every single suspect a fine alibi.
The story had been filmed before, in 1981, by the director Guy Hamilton, and with a script by the playwright Anthony Shaffer (incidentally, the brother of Peter, writer of Amadeus). Peter Ustinov had played Poirot, leading a cast that included James Mason and Dame Maggie Smith, but the critics felt it was a little bland by comparison with Dame Agatha’s very finest work.
I was a little uneasy. I felt that both the new films we made that summer had seen our Poirot series marking time, neither moving him on as a character. It was as if we were standing still, resting on our laurels, not trying to make each and every new film more interesting and more challenging, which had been my ambition from the very beginning. These two new films were certainly watchable, and they clearly delighted around the world, but I wondered privately if there was an element or two lacking, in particular a sense of excitement and imagination.
Perhaps that was reflected in the reception they got when they were finally broadcast by ITV in Britain. It was to be July and December 2002 before Murder in Mesopotamia and Evil Under the Sun were aired, and by then, the intensity of the
initial wave of Poirot fever seemed to have ebbed. There was none of the buzz that had surrounded the arrival of the first and second series a few years earlier. Their popularity around the world may have been growing, but at home, they seemed to be gently on the wane.
Chapter 14
‘ONE OF THE TURNING POINTS . . .A LEGACY TO DAME AGATHA’
As 2000 came to an end, I put the slight sense of unease I felt about ‘treading water’ as Poirot behind me, and turned in a quite different direction – to a radically different character. I made a two-hour crime drama for the BBC called NCS: Manhunt, in which I could hardly have been further from Poirot. I was playing a very contemporary British detective inspector in a distinctly gritty drama, complete with a poorly fitting trench coat, a bad-tempered expression, awful manners and no moustache whatever. Even worse, I always seemed to be shouting at everyone around me.
I could hardly have come further from the delicate manners of the little Belgian, but there were consolations. I was playing alongside Samantha Bond, who had played in The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, but who was now detective sergeant to my detective inspector in the National Crime Squad, with Kenneth Cranham as our team’s target – a sociopathic murderer and kidnapper – in a two-hour film played on two consecutive nights on BBC1. In fact, I ended up playing the same part in another two-hour film a few months later, but that was just the first part of my journey away from Poirot in the new Millennium.
Not long after the first NCS, I found myself playing an apparently respectable headmaster who makes a terrible mistake in Murder in Mind: Teacher, once again for the BBC. This time, my character killed a gay man in self-defence, only to find himself encouraged to murder again by his daughter, to cover up the original killing. Interestingly, the young man who was killed was played by none other than the Scottish actor James McAvoy, who became a television star in State of Play and Shameless in Britain, and then conquered Hollywood with films like The Last King of Scotland and X-Men.
I cannot really explain why, but in the absence of Poirot, darker and darker roles seemed to be finding their way towards me, and none was darker than that of Augustus Melmotte in a four-part adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece The Way We Live Now for the BBC.
With a magnificent screenplay by Andrew Davies, this was costume drama at its very finest: a wonderful cast, beautiful locations, costumes and props, and memorable characters, not least the villain, my character, Melmotte. He was a sinister Jewish financier from a mysterious background, who arrived in the London of the 1870s to make his mark and his fortune. High society fell over itself to meet him, and take advantage of his money.
Melmotte was as delicious a part as Salieri had been in Amadeus, and I could not wait to play him, not least because he reminded me very strongly of another mysterious foreign financier who had arrived in London to charm society – though this time in the 1970s rather than a century before – the charismatic, Czechoslovakian-born Robert Maxwell.
Just as I had done at the beginning of Poirot, to prepare myself for Melmotte, I read every biography of Maxwell I could find, and I found that reading about him gave me an insight into what Melmotte might have been like and how he might have behaved in nineteenth-century London. Maxwell worked in very similar ways, which I confirmed in a meeting with Maxwell’s widow, Elizabeth, who kindly gave me an even greater insight into her late husband and the way he operated.
Strangely, the more I understood about Maxwell – and Melmotte – the more I wondered if, just perhaps, there might be something of both of them in me. After all, as I admitted to one interviewer at the time, ‘I’m a mixed grill of Russian, French and Jewish descent,’ although I was to find out later that there was, in fact, no French in there at all. And even though some of my ancestry was partly Jewish, I turned to Christianity just two years before I started playing Poirot.
Whatever the truth about our similar origins, however, there was certainly something about them both that fascinated me, and made me all the more determined to inhabit Melmotte just as completely as I had Poirot. That feeling became even stronger when I read Trollope’s own description of Melmotte in his autobiography. It reminded me just what a contemporary figure he was.
Nevertheless, a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.
If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.
That was what I wanted to bring to the screen: a man who made dishonesty acceptable, even fashionable, a man who loved to act as the spider in a web of his own creation, to capture unsuspecting flies, render them helpless by his charm, and then devour them. It was the most perfect challenge for a character actor. As Christopher Howse put it in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Melmotte is as powerful a character as Fagin,’ and I knew I could bring him to life.
No expense was spared on the production. The budget was rumoured to be more than £7 million, and the cast included Matthew Macfadyen and Paloma Baeza, as well as Cheryl Campbell, Tony Britton, Rob Brydon and Cillian Murphy, and it was largely shot in the splendid stately home Luton Hoo, in Bedfordshire.
Then, in an extraordinary coincidence – or was it? – the first of the four 75-minute episodes was broadcast on 11 November 2001, the tenth anniversary of Robert Maxwell’s death.
The critics certainly seemed to like it. Peter Paterson, in the Daily Mail, captured that exactly when he said, ‘The Way We Live Now looks as though it will be a big success, not only because it is well-acted and lavishly produced. For both the title and the subject matter parallel our own well-remembered Eighties.’ In a separate feature, the same paper called the drama ‘an oasis in the desert of today’s television’. The Times added that it was ‘pacy and funny and beautifully acted and we should enjoy it while it is there’, while the Guardian concluded, ‘This is one of the winter’s first must-see dramas,’ and called it ‘a delicious dollop of Trollope’.
With the American television station WGBH in Boston involved in the production, it was inevitable that The Way We Live Now would quickly appear in the United States, and it did so on 22 April 2002, to equally good reviews. The Boston Globe called it ‘a classic that feels current’, while the San Francisco Chronicle described it as ‘melodrama with uncommon intelligence and depth’, and the Los Angeles Daily News added that it was ‘witty, filled with intrigue and richly detailed . . . a scabrous commentary on the way it seems we will always live’.
By the time those reviews appeared, however, I had already finished another role for the BBC – a drama-documentary about the British barrister George Carman, a man arguably just as conflicted as Melmotte, with a history of alcoholism, domestic violence and gambling, as well as a glittering career in the law. Get Carman was broadcast in April 2002 and featured extended interviews with Carman’s son, Dominic, who had recently written a book about his complex father.
What was most fascinating for me, however, was that it reconstructed some of the barrister’s greatest courtroom moments, including his defence of the Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe against a charge of conspiracy to murder, and his defence of the comedian Ken Dodd for tax fraud, which included Carman’s wonderful phrase in court, ‘Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants.’
Once again, I was lucky enough to have the advice of some of his family, including his third wife, Frances, who kindly wrote to me afterwards to tell me how odd it had been for her, having known him so well, to see him so well characterised.
Even without Poirot, I was suddenly in demand everywhere. No sooner was
the Carman documentary broadcast, than I was on my way to play another real figure, this time the Iraqi Information Minister in 1991, in a film for the Home Box Office cable network in the United States, about the effect news can have on the prospect of war, called Live from Baghdad. This made-for-television film was shot just a few months before the American and British invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and could hardly have been more controversial. Directed by an Englishman living in Los Angeles, Mick Jackson, the film examined the complexities of 24-hour broadcast news in the days leading up to the first Gulf War, and asked whether news could ever help to avert a conflict.
I was appearing alongside three established film stars, Michael Keaton, who played the senior CNN producer in Iraq at the time, Robert Wiener, and Helena Bonham Carter, as another producer he meets on his arrival, while I was playing Naji al-Hadithi, a man who was by turns cynical and sinister, sharp-witted and seductive. I enjoyed it enormously. It became one of my happiest experiences filming in America, made even more memorable by the fact that during the filming, I was awarded the OBE by the Queen in her Birthday Honours list. I had not told anyone on the set about this, but on the morning of the announcement, I found my canvas chair on the set had the words ‘David Suchet OBE’ painted on the back. It was very sweet of them.
The next film I made was also in the United States, in the autumn of 2002, and it was my second alongside Michael Douglas, a comedy called The In-Laws. The film offered me a chance to get away from playing villains – well, almost. I played an emotionally insecure arms dealer who tries to sell Michael Douglas – who is an undercover CIA agent – all sorts of weapons, including a Russian submarine. I seemed to spend a lot of time wearing white trousers with matching sweaters and looking decidedly camp, not something I suspect Poirot would have approved of entirely.