by David Suchet
‘YOU’RE NOT GOING TO WEAR THOSE HORRIBLE HAIRNET OR MOUSTACHE-NET THINGS, ARE YOU?’
Part of me was still convinced that my Poirot had disappeared forever as the first of our latest films, Mrs McGinty’s Dead, was broadcast by ITV on 14 September 2008. After all, I was sixty-two. It had been twenty years since we had started back at Twickenham Studios, in the summer of 1988, and this was the sixty-second film. Why should it go on?
Looking back, I could hardly believe the years of uncertainty and yet of extraordinary delight. There was no question that the British and American television audiences still seemed to be enjoying them. They had grown familiar with my little Belgian, and they seemed happy to see him again. But it was not only Britain and America. As the years had passed, many other countries had joined his fan club, with the series playing across Europe, Russia, India, Japan, China, Australia and New Zealand, not to mention Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.
One of the things that made the series so successful was that the audience seemed to love Poirot and me by now. As one of the press previews in England put it, when Mrs McGinty’s Dead was shown, ‘The great delight with Poirot is that you always know what you are going to get – a cast jammed with well-known names, high production values, and of course the inimitable Suchet as the possessor of those astonishingly efficient little grey cells.’
Not that everyone was quite so complimentary, however. One reviewer described it as ‘blissful, high-camp, settle-down-on-the-sofa-with-a-bottle-of-wine-and-turn-your-brain-off-stuff’, with a ‘Vaseliney glow’ on the lens and ‘silly accents’.
I still liked Poirot a great deal, even though I was prepared to admit to one interviewer, when Mrs McGinty was screened, that he could be a bit of a pain. ‘I find him irritating sometimes, with his unforgiving view of life and pernickety attitudes, but there you are; that’s him!’ I explained.
But I still desperately wanted to film the last stories and complete the entire canon. It was my greatest ambition, even though I knew that not everyone at ITV agreed with me. We had completed sixty-five of Dame Agatha’s stories about him, but there were still five to go, including the story of his death. If I could reach that landmark, it would mean that I had filmed every single Poirot story. There was nothing that I wanted to do more. It would allow me to say goodbye to him properly.
Cat Among the Pigeons was transmitted on the following Sunday, and The Third Girl the Sunday after that, and once again, the critics were nothing if not kind, while the audiences had grown again. It was so nice to see Zoë Wanamaker, Harriet Walter and Jemima Rooper grace these three films, just as it was a joy to see David Yelland enjoying himself playing George and serving Poirot crème de menthe in the new Whitehaven Mansions flat.
But it was to be fifteen months before Appointment with Death, the fourth film in that eleventh series, would eventually be broadcast. ITV were very proud of it, and wanted to give it the best possible transmission date, on Christmas Day 2009, but I wondered if there was a subliminal message in their delay. Were they quietly implying that this might indeed be Poirot’s final bow?
I certainly had no idea of what their intentions were, but neither was I going to sit at home worrying about it. Just before Christmas 2008, I got a telephone call out of the blue from the American actor Kevin Spacey, who had been acting as artistic director of the Old Vic for the past six years. He wanted to ask a favour – would I be prepared to step in at the very last moment to play an American lawyer called Roger Cowan in a new play called Complicit, by the Pulitzer-prize-winning author Joe Sutton. It explored the question of press ethics and whether reporters were prepared to cooperate with the authorities to overlook the torture of terrorist suspects.
Kevin Spacey was going to direct the play himself, and it would not be a long run, about five weeks between late January and late February 2009. There were to be only two other actors in the cast, Elizabeth McGovern, who had appeared with me in Appointment with Death, and the Hollywood legend Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl, which won him an Oscar as best actor. My part as Dreyfuss’s lawyer was going to be played by another actor, but he had been forced to pull out at the last moment.
I could not resist the challenge. I wanted to work with Kevin Spacey, whom I much admired, and the play was about an interesting and important moral issue – whether investigative journalists should be forced by law to reveal their private sources. The play’s hero, played by Dreyfuss, had written – in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York – a powerful opinion piece advocating the use of torture in the ‘war on terror’, but had then undergone a change of heart, in the wake of the American government’s apparent disregard for international law and alleged military brutality. A government source had provided him with documents that apparently supported his new opinion, but as a result, he is summoned before an American grand jury, who want him to reveal his source. If he refuses, he risks a prison sentence.
It was a strong subject, and I enjoyed playing it, but sadly it did not seem to capture the imagination of the London audience at the Old Vic. To my delight, however, shortly after the run of Complicit was finished, ITV confirmed that Appointment with Death was certainly not going to be the last Poirot. They announced that they intended to make another four films, culminating in a new version of Dame Agatha’s classic, Murder on the Orient Express. When Damien Timmer rang me to tell me, I had a sense of thrill and panic mixed together. The thrill was in making that wonderful story again – which I had very strong views about – but at the same time, I was worried that I would never be able to match Albert Finney’s masterful performance in the 1974 film, directed by Sidney Lumet, with its glittering all-star cast. Albert was nominated for an Oscar as best actor for his performance and Ingrid Bergman won one as best supporting actress. It was a worldwide success, and spawned a further five cinema versions of Poirot stories, including Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment with Death, although Peter Ustinov replaced Albert Finney as Poirot in all the others.
But we were not going to start with Orient Express; the first in what would become the twelfth series would be one of Dame Agatha’s later stories, The Clocks, published in Britain in 1963 and the following year in the United States. When it was first published, Maurice Richardson noted in his review in the Observer that it was ‘Not as zestful as usual. Plenty of ingenuity about the timing, though.’ Our version was going to be a little different.
Directed by Charlie Palmer, the screenplay was written by Stewart Harcourt, who made a string of changes to the original novel. In particular, in the novel, Poirot never visits the scene of the crime and never interviews any witnesses, to defend his often-made boast that a crime can be solved by use of the intellect alone. In our film, however, he interviews every suspect and witness and visits every crime scene, particularly the house in a town on the Sussex coast in which a young secretary has found a body.
Our ambition was to make it a good deal more ‘zestful’, and I am glad to say that I think it worked, not least because we had another terrific cast, led by Anna Massey, in what would be her very last role on television, as the elderly spinster Miss Plebmarsh. What was just as exciting for me, however, was that we also gathered together a group of excellent young actors, two of whom were the son and daughter of old colleagues in the profession.
Tom Burke, who played the leading young man, I had known since he was a baby as I knew his father David and his mother Anna Calder-Marshall. David and I had worked together in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Edinburgh Festival, before Sheila and I had married. Jaime Winston, who played the young typist who discovers the first body, was the daughter of London-born actor Ray Winstone, whom I had worked with in a BBC production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Add the fact that the director was working with his father, Geoffrey Palmer, another old friend, and it gave me a tremendous sense of pride that the Poirot films were attracting so many of the next generation of actors.
The second film we made that summer in 2009 was Three Act Tragedy, which had been published almost thirty years before The Clocks, in 1935, and had appeared as Murder in Three Acts in the United States the following year. When it first appeared, the critics had been generous, suggesting it led its readers a merry dance before Poirot revealed the true identity of the murderer. Originally, Dame Agatha had divided her novel into three acts: Suspicion, Certainty and Discovery, but our screenwriter, Nick Dear, did not stick to that formula for his television version. There had been a previous film version of the story in 1986, starring Peter Ustinov and Tony Curtis, and set in Acapulco, but that had no impact on anything we were trying to do now.
It was a fine script, but what I found most interesting was that I had begun to realise the effect the entire Poirot series was having on young actors. That became even clearer to me when I arrived for the first read-through of Nick’s script with the cast. One young actress was so shocked to suddenly hear me speaking in Poirot’s voice that she screamed out loud. She could not believe she was actually appearing in a Poirot, and it made me think that the series must have become something of a cult among the younger members of my profession. That view was confirmed by the female lead, a lovely young actress called Kimberley Nixon, whom, I quickly learnt, had been a fan of the series since she was a child, and she could hardly believe she was about to appear in one. She was almost overwhelmed by the whole experience, and turned out to be as much of an aficionado of Poirot and all his works as I was. After we had finished, I gave her a present of one of Poirot’s stiff white collars with one of his bow ties around it.
Not that the senior members were not slightly affected by it as well. The producers had been lucky enough to get Martin Shaw to play the leading man, who is famous for a string of television series, starting with The Professionals in the 1970s, and then progressing by way of Judge John Deed and Inspector George Gently. Martin is just a year older than I am, and the irony was that – as a much younger man – I had even appeared in an episode of The Professionals alongside him, when he was a star and I most certainly was not. This was the first time we had acted together since then, and it was a pleasure to have him, not least because he gave a bravura performance as the stage actor and matinee idol Sir George Cartwright, who was said to have been modelled by Dame Agatha on the great 1920s actor Sir Gerald du Maurier, the first man to play Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. It was entirely fitting that our denouement should be filmed on the stage of a theatre.
I had been so lucky to have had such good casts, but the really important thing for me was that the writers we were using were now determined to reveal the strength of Poirot’s religious faith and his moral convictions in each of our new films. In Three Act Tragedy, they revealed his dislike of divorce, because of his Catholicism, and yet also allowed him to accept the complexities of life, leading him to say at one point, ‘I investigate, I do not judge.’
The third of the new films, Hallowe’en Party, was one of Dame Agatha’s very last Poirot stories, published both in Britain and the United States in her eightieth year, 1969. By that time, she had begun to describe herself as a ‘sausage machine’, adding, ‘As soon as one is made and cut off the string, I have to think of the next one.’ Interestingly, she dedicated the novel to the comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, ‘whose books and stories have brightened my life for so many years’. She then added, ‘Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books.’
The story was the fourth of our films to include Dame Agatha’s alter ego, Ariadne Oliver, and she even allowed Poirot to pronounce his verdict on her, which might also have been a comment on the vision she had of herself. ‘It is a pity she is so scatty,’ he proclaims in the novel. ‘And yet, she had originality of mind,’ as Zoë Wanamaker amply demonstrated during the film. It begins with the death of a thirteen-year-old girl who has been telling the other guests at a Hallowe’en party that she once witnessed a murder, only to be drowned in a tub of floating apples. With an expectedly large number of deaths, it is one of Dame Agatha’s darkest stories, the depth of which was brought out by Mark Gatiss. An expert in dark material, it is no surprise that he added an even darker side to Dame Agatha’s original.
Directed again by Charlie Palmer, it attracted another strong cast, led by Timothy West as the local vicar and Deborah Findlay as Rowena Drake, the host of the party, as well as Amelia Bullmore and Julian Rhind-Tutt. But the actor who gave me the greatest pleasure was the extraordinary comedian and comic writer Eric Sykes, who was there to play a local solicitor. Eric and I had met several years before, when I made a documentary about the comedian Sid Field, in the wake of the play I did about him in the West End, and I was thrilled to be with him again. At this point, he was eighty-six years old, and was greeted with the most tremendous respect by his fellow members of the cast, as well as the crew. He gave a simply wonderful performance, and very generously presented me with a copy of his autobiography at the end of filming. Typically self-effacing, his inscription said, ‘It’s been a privilege and indeed an honour to work with a giant in the theatre, with love Eric.’ In fact, the privilege and honour was entirely mine.
Yet the seriousness which had increasingly come to inhabit Poirot and me in recent years was all too apparent, in spite of Eric’s insatiable appetite for comedy and good humour. This was a story about the murder of children, and there was no way Poirot could ignore or dilute that terrible fact. The denouement reflects that exactly, when he loses his temper at the group of suspects for their attitude to the crimes that have ‘led this village to become a slaughterhouse’. It is an anger that positively boils within Poirot throughout the end of the story, and one which I was certainly not going to ignore.
There was another trait, however, that was also part of Poirot’s make-up, the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’. The theme of capital punishment runs through many of the Poirot stories, because it underlines Poirot’s, attitude to murder. Throughout the novels, and the television series, there are regular hangings – as a man, or woman, pays the ultimate price for their crime. It is not something that Dame Agatha shies away from, and certainly Poirot does not either. Remember the ending of Death on the Nile, when it is clear that Poirot knows that the guilty parties will kill themselves rather than face the hangman – he both knows and accepts it.
To allow a killer, or killers, to go free, or at least not to face the possibility of the death penalty, is an alien concept to Poirot. Evil is there to be eradicated, and there can be no escape from the absolute necessity of retribution for a crime that sees a man, woman or child lose their life to a murderer – no matter how disgusting, avaricious, selfish or uncaring the victim may have been. Taking a life demanded that a life be taken in return, that a murderer should face the ultimate price.
The moral dilemma of whether murder can ever be justified, and whether a killer or killers should ever be allowed to go free, lies at the heart of the final film in the series that I started in the summer and autumn of 2009, arguably Dame Agatha’s best-known Poirot story, Murder on the Orient Express. Filming began in January 2010. The notion of retribution is at the heart of what – to my mind – was one of her most disturbing stories, though that had never truly surfaced in the 1974 film. No one could ever gainsay that movie. It was simply wonderful film-making, though Dame Agatha herself had never been utterly certain about it. Most important of all, however, was the fact that there were very significant elements of her original
story which were simply never covered in the film. In particular, it had never addressed Poirot’s deeply held conviction that murder can never be justified, and should always be punished.
When I first heard that we were going to do a new version of the story, I read and re-read the book, to remind myself how just serious it was, and how directly it addressed the core of Poirot’s faith and beliefs. After I had finished, I was more determined than ever that we should be true to the tone of the novel in our new version and bring that conviction into the script, and therefore into my performance. There are no jokes in Murder on the Orient Express. It is an essay in brutal murder, and I wanted to reveal that fact. It is not about a Poirot who is famous for his pernickety behaviour, or his funny hair-and moustache-net; it is a story about evil, and whether it can ever be justified.
In the original novel Dame Agatha never wrote about Poirot wearing a hairnet or a moustache-net, as he did in the original film, never gave him little sly asides, never once made him funny. Instead, she portrayed him as a man confronted by a murder most foul, but who then, in solving it, presents himself with a dilemma that racks his conscience. I remembered clearly her daughter Rosalind’s words to me before I started our very first film: ‘We must never, ever, laugh at him,’ and she then went on, ‘You’re not going to wear those horrible hairnet or moustache-net things, are you? My mother never wrote about them.’
There was nothing whatever to laugh about in Dame Agatha’s magnificent story, for it confronts Poirot, a committed Catholic, with a desperate dilemma, by solving a premeditated murder based in revenge, which some might be tempted to justify on the grounds that it dispensed with the life of a man who took pleasure in destroying other people for his own selfish satisfaction.
That dilemma is what I wanted to bring out, and I was delighted when the director, Philip Martin, and the screenwriter, Stewart Harcourt, who had just written The Clocks, arrived at my flat in London and told me that they wanted to do exactly that – to reveal Poirot’s anger at the murder and his agony at what his conscience would allow him to do once he had uncovered the truth.