Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  That is part of Dame Agatha’s genius. She writes wonderful characters, and it is they who sustain the readers’ or viewers’ interest as the plot develops. She has total understanding for the minds of the people she writes about, and she endows Poirot with her understanding, and then allows him to demonstrate it – particularly in the denouements to her stories.

  You see, I think, and it is only my view, that she started her stories from the end and worked backwards towards the beginning as she developed them. She thought of a plot, and who might have committed the crime, but then travelled back with the idea, which she worked into a story, peopling every member of her cast with individual qualities, including a motive for murder. That is why, so often, it seems as though every single character in her story could have committed the crime.

  For my part, I certainly find that it helps me to work from the denouement backwards when I first read a new Poirot script. To look at it that way round establishes each individual character in my mind, and allows me to check, as we go along, that all the relevant facts that are necessary for the conclusion really do appear in the story itself. It is one reason why the denouements in the films have grown slightly longer. These are Poirot’s moment of theatre, the culmination of all that has gone before, and the time when he commands the story and its characters completely. It is there that he resolves the puzzle that is the crime itself.

  Since the arrival of Michele Buck and Damien Timmer, we had started filming with two cameras running simultaneously. That meant that I could deliver my explanation at the end of the film in one long speech – sometimes taking twenty minutes to do so – without ever stopping filming. The denouement was my opportunity to bring my own theatre experience to the film, because I did not need to take a break.

  Not that I find learning the denouements easy. In fact, it has grown steadily harder as the years have passed, but there is no other way that I can do it except by learning it all in detail. I rely on my discipline as a stage actor – which is what I am, above and beyond even Poirot. I learn the lines myself, but there are also two people who have heard every single line of my Poirot – my driver Sean and Sheila. Just as I had for the very first series, I still practised my lines with Sean in the car on the way to the set, and Sheila and I always worked together on learning the script, and especially the denouements. She would play all the other characters for me, as I rehearsed my lines with her.

  It was hard work, and sometimes we found ourselves getting up at four or five in the morning, learning lines for an hour until the car came to take me to the set. When I’d come back, at eight that evening, I would have a bowl of soup and then we would spend another hour and a half or so going over my lines again, before going to bed at ten, so that we could get up at four or five the next morning to start the process all over again.

  Interestingly, in After the Funeral, which was directed by a newcomer to the series, Maurice Phillips, and shot in the summer of 2005, partly at Shepperton Studios and partly at Rotherfield Park in Hampshire, there were even some backstage moments in a theatre, which I thought made the story even better, because they played to Poirot’s sense of the theatrical and brought into focus everything I was trying to do as an actor in the denouement.

  There were also a series of other delights for me in the film. Sean, my driver, got his first ever appearance on the screen, playing the part of Poirot’s driver in an echo of what we did every single morning, though he was not hearing my lines and he did not make any comment whatever – in real life he certainly does! Plus, Geraldine James was terrific to work with – again – and the cast were incredibly supportive, with Anthony Valentine giving a superb cameo performance as an Italian.

  I enjoyed After the Funeral, but it was not as significant to me as the third film in the new series, Cards on the Table, which brought one of the biggest and most important changes to my life as Poirot on film: the arrival of the idiosyncratic crime writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, played by the wonderful Zoë Wanamaker.

  When Dame Agatha first started Cards on the Table, which was published in 1936, she had an idea for a story that would assemble four murderers and four detectives together in a single flat for two games of bridge – one for the murderers, and the other for the detectives. The ninth person in the flat, the host, who does not play bridge with either group, is sitting in a chair in the room in which the four murderers are playing, and becomes the murder victim. The question Dame Agatha posed was simple – which of the murderers committed the crime, and which of the sleuths would solve it?

  Worried that her readers might not like such a straightforward plot – with just four apparent suspects – Dame Agatha explained in the foreword to her novel, ‘The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological, but it is none the less interesting for that, because when all is said and done it is the mind of the murderer that is of supreme interest.’ As so often in her stories, it is the psychology of the characters that drives the solution.

  One of the four detectives is Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a crime writer who has created a Finnish detective called Sven Hjerson, and is, quite obviously, a fictional self-portrait of Dame Agatha herself. For me, she is one of Dame Agatha’s most endearing characters, a view shared by her second husband, Max Mallowan, as he confirms in his memoirs.

  Significantly, after twenty years of writing Poirot stories by this time, she gives Mrs Oliver a telling series of explanations about why she has become bored with her Finnish fictional detective. ‘I only regret one thing,’ Ariadne admits to Superintendant Battle, another of the detectives (who is actually called Wheeler in our film, though I don’t know why), ‘making my detective a Finn. I really don’t know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said and done.’ There is very little doubt that Dame Agatha was expressing her own growing feelings of dissatisfaction with Poirot.

  Dame Agatha must have liked her fictional alter ego, however, for Ariadne Oliver was to turn up regularly in Poirot stories from then on, and, in particular, in the ones that our production team wanted to film in the future. As a result, they were looking for one actress who would play her from now on, and suggested to me that they would like to cast Zoë Wanamaker in the part. I was thrilled by the idea, because Zoë and I had first joined forces on the stage in 1978, in the RSC’s season, and later appeared together in the Company’s iconic production of Once in a Lifetime, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1930 satirical comedy about the effect of talking pictures on Hollywood. (Ironically, shortly after we finished this series of Poirot, I was to reprise my role of the studio boss for a new production at the National Theatre in London.)

  The Hart and Kaufman comedy was one of my happiest memories in the first years of my stage career, and Zoë and I had become very close. Of all the actresses I know, she is the one that feels most like a sister to me. We seem to act together instinctively, and I was delighted when she accepted a contract to play Mrs Oliver in all the remaining Poirot films. I knew it would be a great reunion, and that the sparks would fly whenever we appeared together.

  Wonderful though it was be to be back with Zoë, there was a far bigger issue that had come to preoccupy me about the films since the new production team had taken over: the fact that Poirot did not have a home. He was now always somewhere else, never at home, and, as a result, had become far too much like so many other detectives, because he had lost his domestic life. The studio set for his old flat in Whitehaven Mansions had been dismantled, and I was beginning to feel that Poirot was increasingly adrift – especially as he no longer had Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon.

  I wanted him to have a home again, and so I asked for a meeting with Michele Buck and Damien Timmer to discuss it. To my intense relief, they both agreed with me and asked the designer, Jeff Tessler, to create one for us – which was to remain in place until The Big Four, in the very final series of Poirot films. When he had finished, Jeff asked me to come to the set early one morning to see
it – and he was very nervous indeed, because he knew how particular I was about Poirot and everything he did.

  Before Jeff and I walked into the studio to see the new flat, I paused and got into character, so that I could look at it through Poirot’s eyes. I am so glad that I did, because when I walked into it, I was almost in tears. It was so perfect for Poirot. Every single tiny detail was right, from the bonsai tree that he trims, to the clock on the mantelpiece; from the square furniture with orange upholstery, in true Art Deco style, to the chrome side tables. It had exactly the precision and symmetry that he would have wanted. It meant that Poirot had his own home again.

  It even had one of my own clocks in it. I am a great lover and collector of clocks, and not long after the change in production team, I spotted, in one of my favourite clock shops, a magnificent Art Deco clock, with a marble base and two columns standing beside a diamond-shaped face, and with a chrome dog standing on top of it. I knew that Poirot describes an almost exactly similar clock, though with a fox on top of it, which he would stroke and then polish away his fingerprints with his handkerchief. I bought the clock at once and donated it to the production, and it sat on the mantelpiece of his new flat.

  That marvellous Art Deco clock is now in my own flat, but it was not the only similarity between Poirot’s home and mine. I love barometers, and insisted that Poirot’s new flat should have one – just I have several at home. The bonsai tree that Jeff put into the new flat is also now back in my own flat – and I even have the little set of gardening tools that Poirot used to look after the tiny tree. It all seems to prove that, somehow or other, I have some of the same obsessions he does.

  Another part of the domestic life that I wanted to create for Poirot again was a manservant. There was no longer a Miss Lemon to look after him, but Cards on the Table called for him to have a valet, a man called George, who attended to his every need.

  I knew the actor I wanted to play the part. Just before we had started filming, I had appeared in a revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1963 play Man and Boy, at the Duchess Theatre in London, which was very well received. One of the other leading actors, who played my assistant Sven in the play, was David Yelland, who is exactly the same age as I am, but looks rather younger, and whose daughter Hannah had already appeared in a Poirot film, Lord Edgware Dies. David made his name playing the future King Edward VIII in the film Chariots of Fire, and I could think of no one who could play the role of George better than he would. Like Zoë, he was contracted to play the part throughout every remaining Poirot film in which George appeared.

  Directed by another newcomer, Sarah Harding, and with a screenplay by Nick Dear, who had written The Hollow, Cards on the Table also starred Honeysuckle Weeks, from the television series Foyle’s War, and the marvellous actor Alex Jennings, who I believe could become a theatrical star to rival the late Sir John Gielgud. But it was my relationship with Zoë, and Poirot’s with Ariadne, that seemed to overshadow almost everything else. We were on the screen together even before the titles appeared, and never looked back.

  Cards on the Table is one of Dame Agatha’s most original crimes, which our script reflected, with a denouement that is beautifully devised – even though, as she explains at the start of her novel, the murderer is one of only four suspects.

  Deepening the audience’s understanding of Poirot’s character took another step forward in the fourth and last of this tenth series of films, Taken at the Flood, which was published in both Britain and the United States in 1948. Originally set in post-war Britain, where the delight of victory in Europe has been overshadowed by austerity, we decided to set it in the 1930s. But it would be fair to say that it still reflects its origins in those difficult years after the Second World War. There is a sense of sadness in it, and it takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, from Brutus’s speech in Act IV: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’

  The story, and our film version of it, reveals yet another of Poirot’s psychological qualities: his moral beliefs, and, in particular, his Catholicism, which the screenwriter Guy Andrews brought out in his script. I had always known that Poirot’s religious convictions were intensely strong, and, indeed, had added this to my list of notes on his character so many years before. He read from his prayer book and Bible every night before he went to bed with his hot chocolate, and held his rosary while he was doing so.

  For me, an essential part of what made Poirot the man he was lay in his conviction that God had put him on this earth so that he could rid the world of evil. That was the raison d’être at the heart of every single one of his actions. As the films had developed, so my conviction that this was the case had grown even stronger. It was to reach its height in Murder on the Orient Express, in which Poirot is faced with a terrible moral dilemma, but it is also very clear in Taken at the Flood, where Poirot confronts his attitude to abortion and is seen praying with his rosary in his hand. It is one of the most striking moments in the film.

  The production was based at Shepperton Studios, with Andy Wilson as the director, and another great cast, including Jenny Agutter, Celia Imrie and Nicholas Le Prevost. There was also Tim Woodward, son of Edward, and, of course, David Yelland as George, to look after the new Whitehaven Mansions flat. The story once again focuses on a battle over a will carried out in an English country house.

  Indeed, the house in Dame Agatha’s original story was based on Warmsley Heath, Archie and Dame Agatha’s house near Sunningdale golf course, which did not hold the happiest of memories for her, which may help to account for some of the darkness in the story and our film. In a review of the novel, the writer Elizabeth Bowen complimented Dame Agatha by saying, ‘Her gift for blending the cosy with the macabre has seldom been more evident than it is here.’ It was a quality that was certainly reflected in our film.

  During the filming, I was asked to contribute to one of those ‘behind the scenes’ documentaries, which was to appear on the DVD when it was released. I greatly enjoyed doing that, and I confessed to the interviewer that 2005 had been ‘my happiest year of all’ on Poirot, and I meant it. The little man and I had revealed to one another a depth and companionship that was very special indeed.

  Chapter 16

  ‘WHY-WHY-WHY DID I EVER INVENT THIS DETESTABLE, BOMBASTIC, TIRESOME LITTLE CREATURE!’

  No sooner had I finished Taken at the Flood, in the autumn of 2005, the last of Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories in the tenth series, than I was in rehearsals for Moss Hart and George Kaufman’s great 1930s comedy Once in a Lifetime, at the National Theatre in London. And just as I had done twenty-six years before at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I was playing the grotesque, but hugely funny, movie-mogul Herman Glogauer. It was about as far away from Poirot as it was possible to imagine. There I was, brandishing massive cigars, wearing the loudest and most vulgar suits and swaggering all over the stage. It was tremendous fun.

  In fact, the following year, 2006, was to be an interesting year for me. Immediately after I finished at the National, I made a television movie for ITV called The Flood, about a storm surge in the Thames that threatened to overwhelm London, alongside Robert Carlyle and Sir Tom Courtenay. Filmed in South Africa, and crammed with special effects, I was playing the Deputy Prime Minister, in charge of the crisis because the Prime Minister was out of the country – just part of a character actor’s life, you might say.

  But then I went on to participate in a project that truly touched my heart. I was invited to make a documentary about animals facing extinction, and was asked which one I would like to choose. There was not a moment’s doubt in my mind – I wanted to make a film about the threat to the existence of giant pandas. As an animal lover, they have always held a special place in my heart, and I have always been horrified by how precarious their existence has always seemed to be. The Chinese emperors of the past considered them so magical that they kept them in their palaces to protect members of their dynasties from evil spirits
.

  Sadly, those days are gone. Giant pandas are now being hunted and their ability to survive is being eroded. Their black and white markings are no camouflage against hunters – because they stand out like a sore thumb against the green bamboo – and their forest habitat is being decimated, as China’s population and economy expands at such a rapid rate. They also sleep for sixteen hours a day, have a terribly troubled love life and have such sorrowful eyes that I cannot resist them. ITV, who were making the documentary, suggested I visit the Wolong research centre in south-west China for a week, to find out more about them.

  When I got there, it was extraordinary. The first time I saw a giant panda in China, it stood so still that I thought I was looking at a model. I got a terrible fright when it moved. Yet it looked so vulnerable, as it padded slowly along, and when it turned to look at me with its wonderful black and white clown face – which must surely have been an elaborate practical joked played by God – my heart melted. There are so few giant pandas left in the world, but it is not too late for us to prevent their extinction.

  That was the message I wanted to convey in my documentary. But what also struck me while I was there was how, even in China, I could not escape Poirot. At one point, as I was filming the documentary, a group of Japanese tourists arrived to see the pandas. Suddenly, and I really do not know how, one of the group recognised me and a great shout went up: ‘It’s Hercule Poirot!’ The pandas were forgotten, and I was surrounded by smiling Japanese tourists, terribly anxious for me to sign autographs and have my picture taken with them. It was very flattering, but a little embarrassing, as I believed the pandas were far more important – and interesting – than I was. But, yet again, it reminded me of the extraordinary affection Poirot is held in by all kinds of people from around the world.