by David Suchet
Shortly after I returned to England, I was invited to Buckingham Palace for the investiture of my OBE by the Queen, which reminded me so much of the mango incident and how I had learned later that Poirot had always been one of her mother’s favourite television programmes. Nine years later, I was lucky enough to be awarded a CBE, which was given to me by the Prince of Wales. By then, it had been two years since I had last played the little Belgian, and I was honestly beginning to wonder whether he would ever see the light of day again when a bombshell struck. I was on holiday back in England with Sheila, on our new narrow boat, when I got a call from Brian Eastman to tell me that something was going on about Poirot.
Brian was reticent on the phone. ‘I’m not sure what’s happening,’ he told me. I asked if there was anything I could do, and he said no, but that he would keep in touch.
Not long afterwards, he called me again and told me that the powers that be at Chorion, who represented the Agatha Christie estate and had been partners with the Arts & Entertainment network for the last four films, wanted to make some dramatic changes to the Poirot format, changes that he feared would not involve him, in spite of all he had done to create and foster the show’s success. I promised that I would do everything I could to help, but I knew in my heart that I was an actor for hire and had no real control over the direction of the series.
I was at a crossroads. I owed Brian an enormous amount for giving me the opportunity to play Poirot, and for supporting me when I insisted that I alone really understood all his foibles and idiosyncrasies. It was Agatha Christie’s family, and in particular her daughter Rosalind, who had first thought of me to play the role and suggested it to Brian, who had then helped to make the series a triumph in so many countries around the world, but now I had to decide whether I wanted to go on without him at my side. It was a tremendously difficult decision, because there was also a part of me that could not bear the thought of never playing Poirot again, never fulfilling my dream of playing him in every single story that Dame Agatha wrote for him.
After a series of meetings, it transpired that Granada Television, part of ITV, wanted to go ahead with four new Poirot films, but they also wanted a far greater input into how they looked and felt than London Weekend had done in the past, when Brian had been the producer. Significantly, they were also prepared to spend many millions of pounds to make them.
There were to be two new executive producers on behalf of Granada and ITV, Michelle Buck and Damien Timmer, who had distinct ideas about how Poirot should evolve. In particular, they wanted each new Poirot to be a two-hour television special, with all the production qualities and cast of a feature film.
They did not want the almost ‘family’ feel of the original one-hour versions, with Hastings and Miss Lemon fussing over Poirot at Whitehaven Mansions. In fact, they did not want to force either character artificially into any of Dame Agatha’s stories in future (as we had sometimes done in the past). Instead, they wanted to be as faithful as they could to the originals. Out would go the opening titles of the train and Christopher Gunning’s music. Instead, each film would be a standalone drama, titled Agatha Christie: Poirot, and would claim its place in the television schedules on its own merit, rather than as part of a series. To put it simply, the new team, led by Michelle and Damien, wanted to make each of their Poirot films a special event on ITV.
Exactly why Brian was not to be involved is a mystery that I have never been able to solve; all I know is that Michelle and Damien invited me to tea at the Ritz Hotel in London to explain their plans. They were incredibly welcoming and extremely enthusiastic, telling me that they wanted to give Poirot a new atmosphere, as they sensed the series had become a bit formulaic, but that their brief from the estate was also to remain true to Dame Agatha’s original stories and character. I was charmed, and excited, but there was still the issue of Brian at the back of my mind.
What should I do? Could I go on without him?
In the end, Sheila asked me the most sensible question of all, ‘Do you want to go on playing Poirot?’
The answer, of course, was yes.
‘Well then, I think you have to do it,’ she said gently. ‘Brian will understand.’
And he did. When I telephoned him to say that I was going ahead with the new series and the new team, he was incredibly understanding.
‘Of course you want to continue,’ he told me. ‘It has nothing to do with our friendship. You must do it.’
It was incredibly generous of him, but I was very upset to lose him, because we had spent fourteen years together, some of the most dramatic years of my professional life. But there were still four new films to be made. What I did not know at the time was that they would turn out to be the turning point in the relationship between Poirot and me.
In the years that have passed since then, Brian has always been very friendly whenever we have met. He and his wife, Christabel, come and see me whenever I am in a West End play, and even took me out to dinner when I was filming in Los Angeles. I am still enormously grateful to him for giving me the chance to play Poirot.
ITV officially announced the new films in November 2002, focusing on their decision to make a new version of Dame Agatha’s famous Poirot mystery Death on the Nile, while at the same revealing that they had also taken over her Miss Marple series from the BBC.
We started work on the first of the new Poirots early in 2003, as ITV had decided that they would like to broadcast two of them at Christmas that year. The first of the films was to be Five Little Pigs, directed by Paul Unwin, who had directed me in NCS: Manhunt for the BBC. The screenplay was by a newcomer to Poirot, Kevin Elyot, who would go on to write the last Poirot film Curtain.
Five Little Pigs was a very different Poirot from those early days at Twickenham. The new film had a distinctly feature-film feel to it, and that was clear from the moment that we started shooting. Now there were far more shots using hand-held cameras, more elaborate exteriors, even grander props; we were certainly in the world of cinema now – even if the film was being made for television.
That was also reflected in the casting. Michelle and Damien had decided to fill each new story with well-known actors that the audience would recognise and identify with, to underline their determination to make it a television ‘event’. This meant that, on Five Little Pigs, I found myself surrounded by Gemma Jones, famous at the BBC for playing The Duchess of Duke Street; Dame Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling; Dame Maggie Smith’s son, Toby Stephens; the talented Sophie Winkleman; and the hard-working and much-admired Patrick Malahide, even if only for a comparatively brief appearance as a barrister. There was no Hugh Fraser as Hastings, no Philip Jackson as Japp, nor Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon, as their characters did not appear in Dame Agatha’s original. The soap-opera element of the Poirot family was definitely over.
Written in 1942 and published the following year, shortly before her daughter Rosalind gave birth to Dame Agatha’s first grandchild, Mathew, Five Little Pigs was retitled Murder in Retrospect in the United States, and was the first of the Poirot stories in which he is called upon to investigate a cold case – the murder of a famous, and not always likeable, English painter named Amyas Crane, years earlier. Amyas was killed with Poison, and sixteen years after his wife Caroline was hanged for the murder, his daughter Lucy asks Poirot to reconsider the case and clear her mother’s name. The British title refers to a well-known children’s nursery rhyme which begins, ‘This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home . . .’ a passion for which Dame Agatha attributes to Poirot rather than herself, although he makes no reference to it whatever during the mystery.
Brilliantly told in a series of flashbacks, Five Little Pigs allows Poirot to visit the five principal suspects in the murder and to interview each of them in his own distinctive style. As Kevin Elyot has him say in the screenplay, ‘My success is founded in psychology – the why of human behaviour,’ and he demonstrates this superbly in one of Dame Agatha’s fines
t and most complex mysteries. As Poirot confesses, ‘Human nature has an infinite capacity to surprise.’
The strength of the cast forced me to raise my game as an actor even further, for not only was I working with some of the finest members of my profession, but the budgets had been raised once again. ITV were reported to be spending more than £2 million on each of the new films. But beyond that, my responsibility as the leading actor had expanded even further, as I had also been given a new role as the unpaid associate producer of the new films, which meant that I had more influence.
This was one of the defining moments in the history of Poirot and me, because now I was entrusted with the role of protector and guardian of my character – and was no longer simply an actor for hire playing a part. In fact, I was the only person among the cast and crew of the new series – apart from Sean, my driver – who had been in the team that had gathered at Twickenham in the summer of 1988.
This really was a whole new world, because suddenly I was involved in almost every decision that was taken about the films. Just to prove it, I was invited to a make-up meeting about my moustache. The new production team wanted to make Poirot’s moustaches look more real – and if you look at my moustache in Five Little Pigs, you will see that it was quite different from the ones from only four years before. It is thinner, a little wider and it does not curl up towards my nostrils as it had in the past, instead it points straight out.
I was also given a whole new set of padding, which I called my ‘armadillo suit’, because it had layers that folded up beneath one another, which allowed me – for the first time – to wear shirt sleeves rather than a jacket all the time, and, more important, allowed me to walk with my head carried a little more forward, just like the blackbird that Dame Agatha had once briefly described in her depiction of Poirot’s posture.
Now, with the added responsibility of being the associate producer of the series, I really felt as though Poirot and I were joined at the hip. I was even allowed to change Poirot’s words, if I believed that he would have said something different. I was invited to ‘tone meetings’ before we started filming and to view see the early edited versions of all the films and offer my opinions on the way they looked to the audience. In fact, I had a creative say in almost everything we did. Even though I had no direct influence on the choice of director and cast, the team would listen to me if I had a particular idea.
I was no longer simply playing Poirot. That rapidly became clear on the set itself when we were filming, as more and more members of the crew would seek out my advice. It brought me a voice and influence that I had never had before, and I relished it, because it provoked me into committing myself more and more in front of the camera, particularly as I was now working with such fine actors. I was thrilled, for example, by the way that Toby Stephens played the scene of his breakdown towards the end of Five Little Pigs.
These changes were confirmed in the second two-hour film we did as part of this ninth series, Sad Cypress. Once again, we had a terrific cast, led by the Liverpool-born Paul McGann, part of an acting dynasty and famous for his roles in the cult film Withnail and I and the BBC’s controversial series The Monocled Mutineer. There was also Diana Quick, the first female president of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society and famous for her role as Lady Julia Flyte in the 1980s television version of Brideshead Revisited, and Rupert Penry-Jones, who went on to make his reputation in the BBC spy series Spooks almost immediately after he finished filming with us.
Originally published in 1940, Sad Cypress took its title from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: ‘Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid . . .’ Indeed, much of its focus is on the indignities of old age, but it also contains one of the few courtroom dramas in a Poirot story – one which rotates around a miscarriage of justice which Poirot tries to avert. Directed by David Moore and with a script by David Pirie, both of whom were new to Poirot, it was darker and more brooding than many of our other Poirot films, and was distinguished by another brilliant performance, this time by Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as Elinor Carlisle, the woman accused, and convicted, of murder.
Dame Agatha had reservations about the story, saying, in 1965, that it ‘could have been good, but it was quite ruined by having Poirot in it. I always thought something was wrong with it, but didn’t discover what until I read it again sometime after.’ Fortunately, many people disagreed with her, and I felt our version of the story – though a touch gloomy at times – worked extremely well.
We filmed many of the exteriors at a Sue Ryder hospice in Surrey, which was filled with elderly ladies and gentlemen, most of whom turned out to be fans of Poirot, which meant that I was invited to visit them on the wards dressed in my costume. It was the first time I remember realising how much pleasure people got from meeting him.
I was very aware, as I went round, that most of the ladies and gentlemen living there related to me only through Poirot, so I made sure to remain in character, answering their questions as Poirot would, and keeping his walk and all his mannerisms. I was also aware that most of the residents would not be going home again, and I could not help but be reminded, as I went from bed to bed, of my own dear father’s final days in a home, when he did not always remember exactly who I was when I went to visit him.
Meeting the hospice residents in full costume was a great deal easier for me then being recognised as Poirot when we were not filming – although that had its extraordinary moments. There was one particular moment that happened around this time which I will never forgot.
I was coming into London on the Tube from our house in Pinner one morning for a meeting, quietly reading and minding my own business as the Tube wound its way through Metroland and into town, when all of a sudden – quite out of the blue – someone in the carriage yelled at the top of their voice, ‘It’s Poirot!’
I looked up to discover that the shout had come from a nun, dressed in full habit, who was now running down the carriage towards me. She proceeded to sit down directly opposite me, squeezing herself between two other unsuspecting passengers, and then reached out, grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously, saying how pleased she was to meet me. I smiled as best I could, and nodded politely.
Things did not end there, however. The nun explained to me that she had just ‘come out of silence’ and could not wait to express her joy at seeing me. She then went on to tell the entire carriage, pretty much at the top of her voice, that she and the other nuns at her convent liked to watch Poirot after dark on Sunday evenings, even though the rules of the convent did not really allow them to do so.
‘It is one of our forbidden secrets,’ she chortled, with a broad smile on her face. ‘It is quite wonderful.’
By now I was as red in the face as a beetroot, and wanted nothing more than for the carriage floor to open up and deposit me on the track beneath – anything to escape – not least because I began to feel rather as though I had become a star in a blue movie which showed every Sunday evening at the convent.
I managed to wish the nun a cheery goodbye as I stepped off the train at Baker Street and disappeared into the crowd, with my cap pulled firmly down over my eyes. But, looking back, it serves to remind me just how lucky I am to have so many different kinds of fans around the world, all of whom seemed thrilled by Poirot. I learnt recently that the series was almost the only English-language programme that was allowed on East German television before the fall of the Berlin Wall – all the others were censored. What is it that makes him so loved? It is a question that came to absorb me more and more.
Back on the set, things were rather calmer. The third film in the new series, The Hollow, was written at the end of the Second World War and published in 1946, becoming one of Dame Agatha’s great successes, selling more than 40,000 copies in hardback in its first year, even in those times of austerity. She herself called it ‘rather more of a novel than a detective story’, and there is no doubt that she peopled her book with some of her most engaging characters – not l
east Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell, whose country house is called The Hollow.
In fact, Dame Agatha partly took the title from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Maud’, which talks about ‘the dreadful hollow behind the little wood’ which lies beneath a field whose ‘red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood’. But she was also inspired by the Surrey home of the formidably double-chinned, London-born actor Francis L. Sullivan, who had played Poirot for her in the 1930s, but is probably now best remembered for playing Mr Bumble in David Lean’s 1948 film of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Sullivan and his wife had a house in Haslemere called The Hollow and Dame Agatha’s book is dedicated to them, ‘with apologies for using their swimming pool as the scene of a murder’.
Once again, the new production team were determined to provide the film with actors of the highest quality, and so, to play Sir Henry Angkatell, we were lucky enough to have my dear friend from Stratford Edward Hardwicke, son of the famous English film star Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and probably best known for playing Doctor Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes for eight years in ITV’s series about the famous detective.
Lady Angkatell, the catalyst in Dame Agatha’s story, who invites the guests to her house party at The Hollow for the weekend, was to be played by the legendary film actress Sarah Miles, who had made her name in Term of Trial in 1962, alongside Laurence Olivier, and had then gone on to appear in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. Famously unconventional, Sarah does very little television, but had been tempted to do a Poirot with me.
The Angkatells’ butler, Gudgeon, was played by another film star, Edward Fox, forever remembered by me as the assassin in Fred Zinnemann’s film The Day of the Jackal. The appearance of not one but two iconic movie stars alongside me was almost overwhelming, and I talked to Edward about filming Jackal whenever I could.