Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  That is why Stewart’s screenplay started by demonstrating to the audience Poirot’s dark mood, with a scene in which a young British officer shoots himself in front of him, spattering his face with spots of blood, and then a brutal scene of a woman being stoned to death. This was not a comfortable country house murder-mystery, where Miss Scarlet may have committed the crime with the candlestick in the billiard room. This was a story about murder most foul, set at a time when killing led to the hangman’s noose.

  Written by Dame Agatha while on an archaeological dig with Max Mallowan in what is now Iraq in 1933, Murder on the Orient Express was published the following year. It was dedicated to her second husband, who is said to have suggested the solution. The book was retitled Murder in the Calais Coach for the United States, because it appeared just two years after Graham Greene’s first major success, his novel Stamboul Train, which had been renamed Orient Express in the United States. The publishers were afraid there might be confusion between the two.

  Dame Agatha had travelled on the Orient Express several times on her way back from archaeological sites before she wrote the novel, and when she came back in 1933, with the story all but completed, she used the opportunity to check some of the details on the train, to be sure they matched her novel. The train was part of her inspiration. In 1929, just a year after she had first travelled on it, the Orient Express was caught in a snowdrift following a blizzard in Turkey and was unable to move for six days. Two years later, in December 1931, she herself was trapped on the train for twenty-four hours, following flooding and a landslide that washed part of the track away.

  The other part of Dame Agatha’s inspiration was, of course, the Lindbergh kidnapping in the United States in 1932. The American aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had made the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1927, had his infant son kidnapped and killed just five years later, in 1932. A maid was suspected of involvement in the crime, and after being harshly interrogated by the police, committed suicide. Some of the elements of that crime lie at the very heart of Murder on the Orient Express.

  The book was certainly well received after its publication. In the Daily Mail, the novelist Compton Mackenzie called it ‘a capital example of its class’, while Dorothy L. Sayers, no mean hand at crime fiction herself, described it as ‘a murder mystery conceived and carried out on the finest classical lines’ in the Sunday Times. Meanwhile, the New York Times commented, ‘The great Belgian detective’s guesses are more than shrewd; they are positively miraculous,’ and Time magazine added, ‘Clues abound. Alibis are frequent and unassailable. But nothing confounds the great Hercule . . .’

  It is another closed-room mystery, though this time one set on a stationary train trapped in a snowdrift, rather than a country house. We chose to recreate the train itself in a studio at Pinewood, to give the cast the same feeling of claustrophobia that the characters would have felt on the train itself, and I think that worked tremendously well. We also benefitted from an extraordinarily good script, and the director, Philip Martin, made the whole piece far darker and moodier than perhaps the audience had been expecting.

  In particular, Philip decided to use a lot of close-ups of my face to underline the nature of the dilemma Poirot was facing, and how perturbed he was by it. Philip shot me in a way that I had never been shot before as Poirot, with so much emphasis on my face, and repeatedly told me not to rush and to go inside the character in search of how Poirot was truly feeling. As a result, it became one of the most exciting experiences with a director that I have ever had. It was challenging every single day, and it was very brave of him to do it, because from it emerged the face of a Poirot trapped in a personal agony, and that was what Philip wanted to shoot. I do not believe I smile once in the entire film; to do so would have been inappropriate to the story, to me, and I was desperate, as I always was, to serve Dame Agatha’s vision in her original novel.

  Once again, ITV had provided a simply wonderful cast, including Toby Jones as the victim of the crime, Dame Eileen Atkins, David Morrissey, Sam West, Hugh Bonneville, the American actress Barbara Hershey and the recently twice-Oscar-nominated (for The Help and Zero Dark Thirty) Jessica Chastain. They all gave tremendous performances.

  The miracle was that we got it done in just twenty-three shooting days, and, to this day, I am not sure quite how we did it, because there is such a lot of dialogue. Poirot’s summing-up speech in the dining car is one of the longest and most difficult that I have ever had to learn and deliver, not least because he rages at those who would seek to overturn the ‘rule of law’ by taking matters into their own hands. It was so testing that Sheila came down with me to help me get through it, and even sat in an adjoining railway carriage during the denouement, to help me get the lines right and make sure I did not lose my way.

  For me, Poirot is fighting both his Catholic faith and his moral reasoning as he confronts what should be done at the end of the story. His faith tells him firmly that man should not kill, but he also knows that the Bible instructs that man should love his neighbour and forgive their sins. He wants to please God and stay true to his belief that part of his role in life is to defeat evil wherever it may be, but that faith contradicts what his moral reasoning suggests: that sometimes people deserve to be forgiven.

  The contradiction finds him trapped in confusion and anger, a most unusual place for him to find himself, and helps to account for the torment that he seems to find himself in throughout the story. I am convinced that when he returns to his compartment after the denouement, to consider exactly what he should do, he spends his time alone there not only praying for God’s guidance, but also painfully aware that he may not be able to follow it.

  In the end, Poirot reaches his decision, but it does not sit easily with him, and I made sure that the last time we see him in the film, he is walking away with his back to the camera, but with his rosary clearly to be seen in his hand. He is carrying the pain of going against his Catholic faith, but at the same time is conscious that sometimes there is no alternative other than to do so.

  Now, I realise that the darkness of this choice means that some people who had only seen the 1974 film, and had never read Dame Agatha’s original novel, might not be quite as enthusiastic about our version. Indeed, I suspect it may never be quite as popular as the earlier film, but the director, the writer and I were trying as hard as we could to stay true to the tone and depth of Dame Agatha’s original, and I think it shows exactly what I always mean when I say that my role as an actor is to serve my writer.

  I did not know it at the time, but it was to be more than two years before Poirot and I would be together again. In fact, I again feared, as we finished shooting, that I might never finish the entire canon of Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories for television. Yet, by a strange turn of events, the next time I climbed back into his waistcoat, spats and gloves, I was to play his death in her final story of his life, Curtain.

  Chapter 18

  ‘IT IS NEVER FINISHED WITH A MURDER. JAMAIS!’

  The shoot for Murder on the Orient Express ended in February 2010, but it was not broadcast in Britain until Christmas Day the following year, rather confirming my suspicion that I might never actually complete the last five stories Dame Agatha had written for Poirot. There was no doubt in my mind that the very best ones had been done already, and although there were four gentle and engaging stories left, there was only one jewel in the crown of what remained: Curtain, Poirot’s final case, which had never been filmed.

  In fact, most of her fans did not even know that she had written a story about Poirot’s death. When I talked to people about it, they were almost all taken by surprise that she had ever allowed him to die. It was as if it were a secret that no one quite wanted to tell. The little man was so loved by almost everyone that it seemed blasphemous to suggest that he might be mortal, even though he was in his sixties when he first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, which meant that he would have been, at the very least, 112 when
he appeared in his last full-length story, Elephants Can Remember, in 1972.

  Our films had always kept him ageless, setting each story between 1936 and 1938, to preserve the period flavour that was so important to him and his stories, while also ensuring that his strict moral code did not seem out of place in the constantly changing world of Britain, moving from the years of austerity into the ‘swinging sixties’, and then on into the recession-plagued 1970s. For us, and the television audience, Poirot was stuck in his time, and all the better for it.

  But I still wanted to serve Dame Agatha, complete the canon of the Poirot stories, and then portray his death. I thought that would give both the audience and me an opportunity to say goodbye to him properly, and allow me to complete a project that had been so close to my heart. So few actors ever get the chance to do that with a character that they have inhabited for so many years – any relationship you have is usually cut off without a moment’s thought or hesitation.

  To complete the canon of seventy films was, however, a big decision for ITV. The shoots had grown more and more expensive, with Murder on the Orient Express costing almost as much as a small-scale feature film, at approaching £2 million, and to commit to another five stories – including Curtain – could comfortably cost them more than £9 million. I knew that it was going to be a hard decision for them to make – especially as they had spent so much already over the years – but I still very much hoped that they would take it.

  There was nothing I could do to influence them, however, and so I went back to work, accepting an offer to play the leading role of Joe Keller in the American Arthur Miller’s great play, set during the Second World War, about greed and the effect it can have on a family, All My Sons. It was a tremendously challenging part, which ended with my character committing suicide off stage at the end of every performance, which meant eight times a week, hardly the cheeriest of experiences for an actor. But I was lucky enough to have not one but two dear friends from Poirot with me, Zoë Wanamaker, who was to play my wife Kate, and Jemima Rooper, who had been with us in The Third Girl.

  Even though All My Sons was one of the more gruelling nights in the theatre, a dark portrait of my character’s utter lack of conscience, it turned out to be a wonderful experience. Directed by the experienced Howard Davies, just a year older than me, it seemed to work from the very beginning of rehearsals, and just got better and better after we opened in the West End at the end of May 2010.

  Thankfully, the critics seemed to agree, because the opening night was greeted with a standing ovation, and the critic from the New York Times even reported hearing the sound of weeping coming from the audience, and when he turned to see where it was coming from, ‘I saw a business-suited man the size of a line-backer, his head buried in his hands, being comforted by a petite blonde woman.’

  I was lucky enough to win the What’s On Stage award as best actor for my performance, while Zoë won the award for best actress.

  On Boxing Day 2011, ITV finally showed The Clocks, which we had filmed no less than two and a half years earlier, which suggested to me that they still saw the films as television special events, and encouraged me to think that, perhaps, just perhaps, they really would commit to filming the final five stories in 2012, and finish them in 2013, twenty-five years after we had filmed The Adventure of the Clapham Cook at Twickenham, way back in 1988.

  But still no one was quite certain, and so I accepted all sorts of offers, including playing the lawyer Jaggers in a new BBC version of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Finally, however, I went back to the theatre again, to play another of the great parts in the history of contemporary American theatre, the drunken, tight-fisted actor James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night. We started rehearsals just after Christmas 2011, and did a five-week tour of the provinces, before bringing the show into London on 2 April, for a five-month run. Like Joe Keller, Tyrone is no saint. He is a man who has driven his wife to drug abuse and his sons to alcoholism, but he represented a tremendous challenge, as the part was one of the great peaks of modern American drama.

  Nothing could ever quite match the joy of my experience in All My Sons, and O’Neill’s play is a brutal examination of a truly dysfunctional family, but I revelled in the opportunity to explore Tyrone. As the critic Michael Billington was kind enough to say, in the Guardian, he thought I brought out ‘James’s forlorn passion for his wife: when he tells her “it is you who are leaving us”, his voice is filled with a sorrowful resignation that stops the heart.’

  The audiences were enormously enthusiastic, but I slowly began to realise that they were certainly not all there to see Eugene O’Neill’s work. After the show was over, group after group of fans from all over the world would come round to the stage door of the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue to see me, most of them fascinated to meet both Poirot and me.

  Some of them could not speak any English at all – even though they had just sat through almost three hours of the O’Neill play. The Russians were particularly enthusiastic. One group came over from Moscow for the weekend to see the play, even though they could not understand a single word of it, because – as they told me, in faltering English – ‘We come to see Hercule Poirot.’ A Japanese group said exactly the same thing, and so did a Chinese group.

  In the end, we put a map of the world up on the wall inside the stage door in the theatre and started to stick pins in it to represent the countries that all the Poirot lovers had come from to see the play. By the time I finished the run, in August 2012, there were pins everywhere around the world. It was an extraordinary commentary on Poirot’s success at touching the hearts of so many people.

  But now, Poirot really did come back into my life again – even if it was to be for the final time. During the latter part of the run of Long Day’s Journey into Night, ITV decided that they would indeed make the final five films, and they wanted to make them in one sequence, ending with Curtain, but I knew that would be utterly beyond me, and Poirot.

  If you read Dame Agatha’s original novel of Poirot’s demise, you will see that in it, he has lost a considerable amount of weight, not just from his body but also from his face, and I wanted to show that to the audience. I needed time to lose a little weight from my face myself, and – even more important – to adjust to the idea that I was saying my final goodbye to him. That meant that I wanted to film Curtain first, and then leave a gap between that shoot and the filming of the final four, more conventional, stories, so that I could recover the weight. That would also give me a chance to recover my emotional equilibrium after the pain of losing him.

  I was delighted when ITV agreed. They accepted that we could film Curtain in October and November 2012, and then go on to finish the other four stories after a break, between January and June 2013. And so it was that, in September 2012, I went for my final costume-fitting for Poirot, first for his clothes for his final Curtain, and then for the four films that were to follow.

  My dresser helped me into the clothes I would be wearing for my final scenes. I had been living and breathing with Poirot for a quarter of a century, and I now realised that our relationship was actually coming to an end. It was bound to have an effect on me, because I had already decided that I would never make a film which was not based on Dame Agatha’s work. I had no wish to play the part in Poirot films that were not based on her stories.

  When I arrived at Shirburn Castle near Wallingford in Oxfordshire for the first day of shooting, driven there by Sean, it was an extraordinary, almost out-of-body, experience. The crew treated me with kid gloves, though they were almost as much in mourning for Poirot as I was. But we were in good hands. ITV had suggested that Hettie Macdonald, who had worked with me on The Mystery of the Blue Train back at Shepperton in the summer of 2005, might direct Curtain, and I was delighted with the choice. I thought she had exactly the right sort of empathy for this delicate but strong story, which sees Poirot confront one of the most evil, and audacious
, murderers in his career.

  The original novel was, almost certainly, written in 1940, when Dame Agatha had become truly fed up with her most famous detective, but her publishers had insisted she continue to write about him because he was so popular. By 1975, however, just a year before her death, they accepted that she was no longer capable of completing another novel, and agreed that it was time for Curtain to see the light of day. It was published just a few months before her death in January 1976, as if the fictional detective and his creator could not really live without one another.

  It was an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, with the first hardback edition selling 120,000 copies, and the American paperback rights selling for $1 million. In the Observer, Dame Agatha’s long-time admirer, but also stern critic, Maurice Richardson, described it as, ‘One of her most highly contrived jobs, artificial as a mechanical birdcage, but an unputdownable swansong.’ The Guardian’s critic, Matthew Coady, nominated it as his ‘Book of the Year’, saying, ‘No crime story . . . has given me more undiluted pleasure,’ and adding, paying another tribute to Dame Agatha, ‘As a critic, I welcome it, as a reminder that sheer ingenuity can still amaze.’

  To be honest, it may not have been her finest Poirot story, but it was certainly her most deeply felt. and the whole world seemed to be affected. No other fictional detective, for example has ever been honoured with a report of his death on the front page of the New York Times, written as an obituary, without the slightest sign of its tongue in its cheek, concluding: ‘“Nothing in his life became him quite like the leaving of it,” to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.’

  In Curtain, Hastings goes to visit Poirot in Styles, the scene of their first encounter, and now a country guest house, where he is being looked after. Our screenwriter, Kevin Elyot, who had written the excellent script for Death on the Nile, carefully brought out the poignancy of their reunion. But Hastings’ return also meant my final reunion with Hugh Fraser, so long my most stalwart friend throughout the early series, but who had disappeared from the films in the years after Brian Eastman had left. It was such a joy to see him back again, and there was no one that either Poirot or I would rather have spent our dying moments beside.