by David Suchet
When we finished filming, at the end of November 2012, I made a brief speech to the crew on the set at Pinewood, and then retired to my trailer. To see someone you have loved for so long disappear from your life is one of the most difficult things for any actor to cope with. The sense of grief and loss almost overwhelmed me for a while, but I was lucky enough to have Sheila beside me on the set in the final moments of Poirot’s life, and after we had quietly packed up my things, Sean drove us home to our flat. A part of my life had gone, even though, ironically, I still had four films to finish.
It was not until the middle of January 2013 that I went back to Pinewood to film Elephants Can Remember, the very last Poirot novel that Dame Agatha wrote, which was published in 1972, fifty-two years after her first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It held one great consolation for me – it marked the return of Ariadne Oliver, and my dear friend Zoë Wanamaker. She, and Sheila, made the return to the ‘armadillo’ costume, the moustaches, the spats and the waistcoats, bearable in the wake of his death. It seemed strange to resurrect him, but that is part of an actor’s life. You can find yourself doing the oddest things.
But I did wonder to myself, as I walked back onto the sound stage at Pinewood, ‘Where am I?’ The answer was simple: ‘Right back where you started, and where you and Dame Agatha have been for the past twenty-five years.’
I also knew that this was the beginning of the final act, the last stage of my journey with Poirot. The cast which had assembled around me made it easier to deal with the knowledge that our voyage together was coming to its end. Not only was Zoë back, but there was also Iain Glen, whom I much admired, Vincent Regan and a beautiful young actress called Elsa Mollien. The script by Nick Dear was excellent, and the whole thing was beautifully shot – very much keeping up the production standards the series had always displayed.
The story was strong, with Poirot re-examining the case of what may or may not have been a murder, committed more than twenty years earlier, after being asked to do so by the daughter of the dead couple found on a cliff-top overlooking the English Channel. It was a good film, but nothing like as challenging for me as Curtain.
By now, however, ITV had realised that the worldwide interest in the thirteenth and final Poirot series was growing at an extraordinary pace, and so they decided to respond by scheduling Elephants Can Remember for its first transmission on Sunday, 9 June 2013, barely three months after we had finished shooting it. There was no doubt that they were well aware – and I have to say, so was I – just how much interest there was around the world in the final five films of the series, and, most of all, in Curtain.
That became abundantly clear in early April 2013, when, during a break in the filming, Sheila and I were invited to the MIP television festival in Cannes for a gala in honour of the series. It turned out to be the most extraordinary event we have ever attended. There were 400 television buyers from around the world, all of them – apparently – huge fans of Poirot and the series, and all there not only to honour the sixty-five films that we had already made and had been broadcast, but also to express their enthusiasm for the final five, and especially Curtain.
There was a tremendous promotional video, and then a private dinner, which ended with a set of speeches, including one from me. I thanked everyone for their kindness and support for the series, and did my best to try and stay calm, which was not exactly easy, because, as Sheila and I said to each other as we left, the whole event was almost overwhelming, with all those industry professionals at the party and the dinner standing and applauding something that we had been making for twenty-five years, and which had all begun with me walking round and round my garden in Acton, trying to capture Poirot’s mincing strides.
It was almost an anti-climax to find myself back at Pinewood again, to film the next in the last series, The Big Four, published in 1927, the year after Dame Agatha’s disappearance and the collapse of her marriage to Archie Christie. She had hardly written anything since those twin dramas in her life, but she had also realised that she needed to keep up the flow of novels to satisfy her ever more enthusiastic readers. It is said to have been Archie’s brother, Campbell, who came up with the idea that she did not need to write a new book until she was ready to, and suggested that she could adapt the twelve short stories that she had written for the weekly magazine the Sketch in the months before her disappearance. He thought, and she agreed, that they could be reassembled into one long story, and thereby transformed into a novel. Dame Agatha was only too well aware that, with Archie pressing for a divorce, and without a recognisable source of income of her own except from her writing, she needed to ensure that she made a living.
Hardly surprisingly, the novel was not among Dame Agatha’s finest. It felt like something that had been cobbled together in a rush, and the four central characters were reminiscent of something her contemporary, the English thriller writer Edgar Wallace, might have come up with. After all, he had published his own thriller series, The Four Just Men, starting in 1905. That too had grown out of newspaper serialisations, although Wallace’s four main characters were acting for good, while Dame Agatha’s were certainly set upon evil.
The four were a shadowy Chinaman called Li Chang Yen, a French femme fatale called Madame Olivier, a vulgar American multimillionaire called Abe Ryland, and a mysterious Englishman known only as ‘The Destroyer’. I cannot help thinking that another part of Dame Agatha’s inspiration came from the fictional Chinese villain Fu Manchu, created by the Birmingham-born novelist Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, always known by his pen name of Sax Rohmer, in a set of novels beginning in 1915.
In Dame Agatha’s original novel, Poirot’s brother, Achille, made a brief appearance, to help his only sibling, rather as Mycroft Holmes would sometimes come to the rescue of his brother Sherlock. Meanwhile, the one woman Poirot truly admired, the flamboyant Russian Countess Vera Rossakoff, also appeared in the original story, but neither she nor Achille appeared in Mark Gattis and Ian Hallard’s version for our new film.
In fact, both screenwriters took a number of liberties with her original story to make the film work for a television audience in the twenty-first century. But Dame Agatha’s original novel did see the return of Hastings, Miss Lemon and Chief Inspector Japp, and they did indeed feature in our version. It was a delight for us all to be back together again.
Almost as a foretaste of Curtain, our new version of The Big Four opens with Poirot’s funeral, as if to prepare the audience for the fact that he would be taking his leave of them at some point in the not too distant future. Hastings, Miss Lemon and Japp are at the graveside, and then assemble back at Whitehaven Mansions, with Poirot’s manservant George, to pay tribute to the man George calls ‘the best of masters’ and Hastings calls ‘the best of men’ as they raise their sherry glasses.
In fact, Poirot’s ‘death’ is simply a device in the story, which then goes into flashback to reveal the ambitions of the so-called ‘Big Four’ to control the world, a desire that Poirot thwarts in Dame Agatha’s original novel. In our version, their desire is rather more for ‘world peace’, in the face of the prospect of an impending war in Europe, but there is also a domestic element to our film. In spite of his apparent death, Poirot is not ready to leave the stage quite yet, and takes some pleasure in conducting the denouement, once again in a theatre, with the principals assembled around him, including Madame Olivier, played by my old friend Patricia Hodge, who had appeared as my wife in the BBC film about Robert Maxwell.
For The Labours of Hercules, which we started filming in the middle of April 2013, it was all but impossible to remain loyal to Dame Agatha’s original collection of twelve delightful short stories, published in 1947, in which an old academic friend insists that Poirot will never retire, even though he is discussing his desire to give it all up and grow marrows.
In the original stories, Poirot then asks Miss Lemon to provide him with the background to the Greek myth of Hercules’ twelve labours, which were impose
d upon him by the King of Tiryns. As a result of her research, Poirot decides that he will complete just twelve more cases himself and then retire – although, of course, neither Dame Agatha nor her publishers ever allowed him to, no matter what she may have said in her stories.
When the collection was first published, Dame Agatha’s fellow crime novelist Margery Allingham described it as every bit ‘as satisfactory as its title’, adding that she ‘often thought that Mrs Christie was not so much the best as the only living writer of the true or classic detective story’.
The twelve ‘labours’ Poirot chooses in Dame Agatha’s original are so diverse that Guy Andrews, who was writing the new screenplay and who had adapted so many of her stories for the television series over the years, decided to create an almost entirely new story, though using some of her characters. He based his new version around a jewel thief and murderer called Marrascaud – ‘the most vicious maniac in the history of crime’ – who kills a young woman whom Poirot has promised to protect, before fleeing to a hotel in the Swiss Alps, only to be trapped there in a snowstorm. To add to the mystery and stay close to the title, the whole affair pivots around the theft of a series of paintings known as ‘The Labours of Hercules’, by an entirely fictional Dutch painter named Hugo van Druys.
Guy’s new version is enlivened by the return of the Countess Rossakoff, who had captured a portion of Poirot’s heart before abandoning him to continue her career as a jewel thief in the United States, at the end of Dame Agatha’s story The Double Clue. In fact, the Countess appears in the last of the twelve original stories, called The Capture of Cerberus, where she is running a London nightclub called Hell, guarded by an enormous dog. But in this new version, she is simply staying in the hotel in the Alps with her daughter Alice. Orla Brady took over the part of the Countess from Kika Markham, who had played her in The Double Clue, which had been broadcast no less than twenty-two years earlier. Orla was joined in the cast by actor and writer Simon Callow, now rightly famous for his one-man shows portraying the life and works of Charles Dickens.
In the best Poirot tradition, Guy gave everyone in the Swiss hotel some kind of guilty secret, which they are protecting when Poirot arrives, and the denouement is distinctly more dramatic than in some of the earlier stories. It even includes a struggle with a gun, but Andy Wilson, who directed the film and had done both Death on the Nile and Taken at the Flood in the past, made sure to keep the touch primarily light throughout, in spite of the drama of the ending. After we had finished it, I found I had enjoyed it more than I had expected to, being so aware how very different our version was to Dame Agatha’s original. Somehow, I do not think she would have objected too much to what we had done, as we had included so many of her trademark twists and turns. Indeed, it was almost as if we were now following in her footsteps, aware of her looking over our shoulders.
Then, towards the end of May 2013, came the moment that I had been preparing myself for quietly since the filming of Curtain at the end of 2012. We started to film our very last Poirot film, and the reality of what life might be like after the little Belgian and I finally parted became a stark reality. Not that I had much time to think about that as we began; there was so much to do, and so little time to do it in. The shooting schedule demanded that we were finished by the end of June, so that the programmes could be broadcast later in the year, and so I did not have much time to reflect as we gathered together at Pinewood again to make Dead Man’s Folly.
Not one of Dame Agatha’s Poirot masterpieces, it was published in 1956, the year she was awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours by the new young Queen Elizabeth II – it was not until 1971 that she became a dame. Dead Man’s Folly has many typical Poirot characteristics. There is a country house, an aristocratic family intent on bickering, some dysfunctional friends from the ‘county set’, and a former owner who may bear a grudge, while, to add a little piquancy, there is also the reappearance of her favourite fictional crime writer Ariadne Oliver. When it first appeared, the critic Maurice Richardson, in the Observer, called it ‘Nowhere near a vintage Christie, but a pleasing table read.’
The story opens with Mrs Oliver invited to a country house to help organise a ‘murder hunt’ (instead of a ‘treasure hunt’) at the village fete, held in the grounds of the fictional Nasse House on the banks of the fictional River Helm in Devon. It is owned by Sir George Stubbs and his young wife, Lady Hattie. Part of Mrs Oliver’s idea is to have the ‘body’ found in the boathouse on the edge of the river, but as she is planning what to do, she senses that something is dreadfully wrong and sends a telegram to Poirot, urging him to come down at once.
Our new version – there had been a television film made from the story in 1986, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot – was written by Nick Dear and remained absolutely true to Dame Agatha’s original story. To my delight, Zoë Wanamaker was back again, to play Ariadne Oliver; it was such a treat to have her with me for this last film in the series. It was the seventieth Poirot television film I had made since that summer morning in Twickenham a quarter of a century earlier.
As we started shooting, I was not quite sure what to expect. Would the memories of the past twenty-five years ambush me every day, the ghosts of so many stories and so many characters stalk me as I climbed back into my padding and spats for the final time? I really did not know, but one thing I was certain of: I was determined to make this last film a true celebration of the whole experience of being Poirot. I knew I would mourn him when he was gone – I thought millions of other people would too – but I was not going to allow him to depart without the most joyful experience I could bring to him. This was my final chance to show just how much I loved and admired the little man.
There would even be one last chance for Poirot to reveal something of his firm moral compass. At one point, he tells the former owner of Nasse House, Mrs Folliatt, played by the Irish-born actress Sinéad Cusack – wife of actor Jeremy Irons – that she knows who the killer is but is not prepared to say so, because she thinks that would be ‘wrong – even wicked’. At that point, Poirot struggles to keep his temper: ‘As wicked as the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl?’ he demands. When she replies that the matter is ‘over and done’, Poirot attacks her as fiercely as he did the passengers trapped in the Orient Express. ‘It is never finished with a murder. Jamais!’
That was the voice of the Poirot who had grown in depth and complexity with me over the years of filming, that was the Poirot who could rage at the foolishness of people who thought they were above the law, and who thought that they could – literally – get away with murder, because they had every right to do so. That was the man whom I had always fought to protect, the man who wanted to save the world, and the innocent, from evil, the man who had grown to be so much a part of me.
The filming was particularly personal and poignant for another reason – far beyond even Poirot’s character. The second most significant thing about Dead Man’s Folly, beyond the fact that it was the last film in the series, was that the fictional Nasse House was so clearly inspired by Dame Agatha’s own magnificent Georgian house, Greenway, on the banks of the River Dart in Devon, which she and Max Mallowan had bought in 1939 for £6,000. They remained there after the outbreak of war, but then it was requisitioned to be used first as a nursery for children evacuated from London, and then as accommodation for men from the United States Navy.
After they left Greenway, the Mallowans moved to London, where they remained for the remainder of the war, only returning to Greenway for the summers after the war was over. It was to become one of three houses they had, along with one in Chelsea in London – where Dame Agatha always insisted she felt it was ‘easier to write’ – and another in Wallingford in Berkshire. But the one she loved the most was Greenway.
So, in some strange twist of fate for Poirot and for me, we were to shoot the final sequences of Dead Man’s Folly at Greenway itself in the last days of June 2013, sending Hercule Poirot to Dame Agatha’s own home. It would b
e the first time that the fictional character of Poirot arrived at the home of his creator. What would it be like? How would he feel? How would I feel? I could not get the thought out of my mind.
Chapter 19
‘BUT MOST OF ALL, TO YOU ALL, AU REVOIR AND MERCI BEAUCOUP!’
The afternoon’s summer sun is glinting off the River Dart below me as I am sitting in the back of a vintage car driving towards the square white front of Greenway, Dame Agatha’s three-storey Georgian house on the banks of the river in Devon. I am in full Poirot costume – black patent leather shoes, spats, three-piece suit complete with waistcoat and watch chain, light overcoat, Homburg hat, moustache and, of course, carrying Poirot’s favourite silver-handled cane – when I climb out of the car and walk towards the front door.
It feels distinctly strange. For this is the first time that Poirot has ever visited the home of the woman who created him, the first time that her fictional detective has set foot in the house that she bought with her second husband Max Mallowan in 1938. Greenway is now very much the spiritual home of the woman who went on to become the biggest-selling novelist the world has ever known, with two billion books to her name.
As I put my hand out to reach for the handle, there is a moment, a single, piercing moment, when I am not truly sure who I am. Am I an actor, who has played the role of Poirot for a quarter of a century in seventy television films, or have I actually become this little man that the world, and I, love so much? Where do I stop, and where does he begin? It feels as if I am in a dream, watching me being me, and yet playing Poirot.