Poirot and Me (10 page)

created, I was certain of that. I would not

compromise.

Now, I am not a confrontational man.

Frankly, I don’t like any kind of confrontation

at all. It upsets me too much. But I’ve

always found it easier to argue for someone

else – in this case, Hercule Poirot – rather

than for myself. That way, I’m defending the

character, not being a sort of grand ‘luvvie’,

a word which I hate.

Ed Bennett was adamant that it looked

silly, and I was every bit as certain that it

was precisely in character, and so the shoot

came to a dead stop.

Brian

Eastman

was

summoned

to

adjudicate. I had some distinctly anxious

moments as I waited for him to decide how

we should play this scene. I only knew what

my instinct told me. I had to be true to

Poirot.

Fortunately,

Brian

went

with

the

handkerchief, and the shoot resumed, with

me wiping the park bench before sitting

down. I’m not exactly sure what would have

happened if Brian’s decision had gone the

other way. Perhaps I would have accepted it,

but in my heart, I very much doubt it. I think

it would have made continuing to play Poirot

much more difficult for me, as I would not

have been true to the man I had come to

know so well.

Yet the irony is that in the final cut of The

Adventure of the Clapham Cook, the one

that was eventually broadcast around the

world, you only see Poirot, umbrella in hand,

standing beside Hastings, who is sitting on

the park bench. Poirot never actually sits

down! The scene of Poirot wiping the park

bench with his handkerchief ended up on the

cutting-room floor. When I saw that, I

allowed myself a wry little smile.

I am not sure that it made the slightest

difference to the audience’s enjoyment of

the story and, if I am truly honest, I do not

believe that it diluted my interpretation of

Poirot, but, in spite of that, the ‘affair of the

handkerchief’ mattered desperately to me at

the time. Someone had to stand up for and

protect Dame Agatha’s Poirot, and that

person was going to be me, no matter what

the consequences might be.

I felt that responsibility more and more as

the weeks passed on the first series,

because I knew that by putting myself in

that position, I was getting closer and closer

to the character I was playing. The more

that I knew about Poirot, the more I could

protect him.

What began as my exploring Poirot and his

character gradually developed into a

relationship in which we began to merge into

one – so much so that by the end of the

series, I knew that I could have gone out

into the real world, rather than a television

studio, dressed in his costume, and lived his

life exactly as he would have lived it, and

still have beeen myself.

Poirot and I steadily became one and the

same man. Suddenly it was Poirot and me.

Chapter 4

‘I’M AFRAID THEY’RE

GOING TO BE TOO

TAME, OR TOO

ECCENTRIC’

The second Poirot story we shot, though

it was the third to be transmitted,

started exactly two weeks after our first. It

was The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly – the

case of an attempt to foil a threatened

kidnap of the son of a wealthy landowner,

Marcus Waverly, played by my old friend

Geoffrey Bateman.

Geoffrey and I had definitely worked

together before – at the Connaught Theatre

in Worthing in 1971 – when he played a

Samurai warrior in a stage version of the

classic 1950 Japanese film drama Rashomon.

It was very early in my career, and I directed

all the fight scenes, as well as playing the

bandit. Now Geoffrey was playing the

landowner whose huge country house seems

to be falling down around his ears, while his

son is in danger.

For this story we had a new director,

Renny Rye, who was then only forty and

would go on to direct five episodes of that

first Poirot series. Renny started his

television career producing the children’s

programme Blue Peter, before graduating to

drama. He was to stay with Poirot until

1991. Since then, he has gone on to direct

episodes of the British television series

Midsomer Murders

and Silent Witness,

among many other things.

Because of the schedule, Ed Bennett,

who’d directed Clapham Cook, disappeared

into the cutting room to edit his film, while

Renny worked on Johnnie Waverly. Then Ed

would return to direct the third, while Renny

went away to edit his. Alternating the two

directors was the only way we could be sure

to produce the films within the twenty weeks

that we had been given by London Weekend,

who were keen to transmit the series in

January 1989, barely three weeks after we

would finish shooting.

Johnnie Waverly again reminded everyone

how much Poirot loathed the countryside,

especially when he is forced to walk across

the fields after Hastings’ Lagonda breaks

down just minutes before the threatened

kidnap is about to take place. The resilient

Chief Inspector Japp arrives with a team of

constables in an effort to foil the crime, but

to no avail, although Poirot realises that the

kidnap must have been organised by

someone who knew the family, and

eventually retrieves young Johnnie.

The bond that was beginning to develop

between Hugh, Philip and me seemed to

grow as the weeks passed, and it was

certainly clear for all to see at the start of

the third film, Murder in the Mews, which

opened with the three characters walking

home after dinner past a November

fireworks party and the mews where

Hastings garages his Lagonda.

I also seemed to develop a rapport with

the rest of the cast. David Yelland was one

of the guest stars of Murder in the Mews.

He’d played the Prince of Wales in the Oscar-

winning film Chariots of Fire. Educated at

Cambridge, where he read English, and only

a year younger than I am, he was wonderful

as the ambitious MP Charles Laverton-West.

No sooner had we finished Mews than we

were on to the next, Four and Twenty

Blackbirds. There was hardly a moment for

me to do anything except go to Twickenham

and work. That meant that I had to leave

home every morning at 6.30 a.m. and I often

didn’t get back to Pinner until 8.30 or 9 p.m.

I’m afraid that meant that Sheila and the

children did not see a great deal of me in the

months between July and Christmas 1988,

because even when I did get home, I had to

look at the script for the next day. I

eventually got into the habit of making sure

that I learnt my lines at least two weeks

ahead, to overcome the panic of trying to

learn them the night before.

One difficulty for me was that Poirot

always had to explain exactly who did it – at

the end of the story – to whichever group of

people had been involved, including, of

course, Hastings and Japp. So I found myself

often having to learn quite long speeches

after I’d finished filming for the day. I tried to

prepare for them by making sure I looked at

them throughout the filming, but, inevitably,

when it came down to making sure I had

them firmly in my mind, everything hinged

on the night before we were due to shoot.

The denouement was the moment when I

revealed

the

murderer

to

everyone,

including, most important of all, the

audience. I simply could not allow myself to

get it even a fraction wrong; that would have

been to let Poirot down, and I would never

allow myself to do that.

There was another issue about the

denouements, however, which involved

being true to Poirot and to myself as an

actor.

When Dame Agatha wrote those final

scenes where the villain is revealed, she was

allowing Poirot his ‘theatrical’ moment. He is

well aware of who is guilty as he goes round

the room explaining the nature of the case,

but Dame Agatha and he often take great

pleasure in picking on an innocent party and

seeming to accuse them of the crime, before

revealing their innocence. It was her way of

building up suspense for the final ‘reveal’.

In those scenes, Poirot is acting – teasing

the characters, apparently accusing them

and then changing his mind, making them an

essential part of the final drama – and in

that sense, he is treading on my territory as

an actor.

Now, because I am an actor, I know

precisely how to play those scenes, for they

allow me to use my theatricality. I feel

instinctively what I need to do, and how to

do it. No one needs to direct me in those

denouements because Poirot has strayed

into my world as an actor, which means that

– in a strange way – I feel more comfortable

doing those scenes than almost any other.

In fact, it is in those scenes that Poirot and

I completely merge, touching one another in

a quite extraordinary way. There is the actor

in Poirot which merges almost seamlessly

into me the actor; the perfectionist in Poirot

and the same perfectionist in me; the need

for order in Poirot precisely matched by my

own need for order, not least in the filming

of his stories.

We are all but one person, so much so

that I often feel the line between us blurring.

If he feels pain, so do I; if I feel unsettled, it

shows in him. Our symbiosis is all but

complete. Interestingly, the fifth film in the

first series, The Third Floor Flat, reflects

exactly that, especially when it comes to

Poirot’s respect for women.

The story is almost entirely set in Poirot’s

Whitehaven Mansions, which is actually

named Florin Court and lies in Charterhouse

Square in London, not far from a fourteenth-

century monastery which later became a

Tudor mansion, an almshouse and a school

in the seventeenth century.

Hidden away not far from Smithfield

Market, Charterhouse is one of the most

beautiful and secret of all London’s squares.

On the east side, Florin Court was built in

1936, and consisted of nine floors, a roof

garden and an indoor swimming pool, all in

the Art Deco style. It is one of the best-

preserved of all the Art Deco blocks of

apartments in London, which made it the

perfect location for Poirot’s flat, Number 56B,

on the fifth floor.

Regalian

Properties

refurbished

the

building in the 1980s and kindly allowed us

to film there, but it still looked exactly as it

had done when it was built. The stories in

the first series were all set precisely at a

time when the block would have been new,

between 1936 and 1938, even though Dame

Agatha had, in fact, written most of them a

few years earlier. From the very beginning,

Brian Eastman had been very keen to set all

the films within a certain period of time, to

give them a particular look and feel.

The Third Floor Flat allows Poirot to reveal

his dislike of being ill and bored. As the story

opens, he has a terrible cold, and is

complaining to Miss Lemon that he has had

nothing interesting to do for three weeks –

‘an eternity for a brain like mine’. To divert

him, Hastings arranges a trip to the theatre,

inevitably to see a murder mystery, which

only further infuriates Poirot, as he insists

the man who is finally revealed to be the

murderer could not possibly have done it.

The true culprit was, for Poirot, obviously the

butler.

The irony of a detective not agreeing with

a playwright’s view of who might have been

the killer is not lost on Hastings on their way

back to the flat. But the mood quickly