Poirot and Me (19 page)

in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, although

this time it is the woman who is leaving the

country for a new life, while Poirot is left

standing on the station platform, alone with

his thoughts of what might have been.

In the next film in the series, Poirot

confronts menace rather than love.

The Mystery of the Spanish Chest first

appeared in Dame Agatha’s collection of

short stories The Adventure of the Christmas

Pudding in 1960, which hardly sounds

threatening at all. Yet it is one of the most

frightening stories she wrote. It was actually

an expanded version of one of her earlier

stories, The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest,

which first appeared in a collection called

The Regatta Mystery in the United States in

1939, but was not published in Britain until

1960.

Chilling from the very start, it opens with a

ferocious fencing match involving the

mysterious

Colonel

Curtiss,

who,

it

transpires, might just be a British spymaster.

He was played by another extraordinary

actor John McEnery, then in his late forties

and capable of conveying malice in the most

dramatic way. An old friend, he was a former

member of the National Theatre and had

made his name in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968

version of Romeo and Juliet.

When John held a sword to my throat

during the filming of The Spanish Chest, it

was one of the few times when both Poirot

and I felt truly frightened, for he made it so

realistic that there was a moment when I

almost convinced myself that he would

actually plunge the blade into my throat. It

shows on the screen.

Set once again among the English upper

classes, Poirot is hired by Lady Abbie

Chatterton because she is afraid that her

friend Marguerita Clayton may be killed by

her husband Edward, who has a violent

temper. As a result, Poirot is invited to a

party to meet Clayton, who – mysteriously –

fails to appear. His body is found the

following day, hidden in a chest. He has

been stabbed through the eye.

With a terrific script from Anthony

Horowitz, and directed by Andrew Grieve, it

allowed another of those special moments

when Poirot and I came together.

‘I was lucky, that is all,’ Poirot says near

the end of the story, and then adds, with a

slight twinkle in his eye, ‘It is more English,

yes, the humbleness.’ There is a pause

before he concludes, with his tongue in his

cheek, ‘No one shall match Hercule Poirot for

his humility.’

Like Poirot, I too believe in humility, but

there is a twinkle in both of us, for there is

also an element of confidence, perhaps even

vanity, which we both share. How could we

do what we do if there were not?

John McEnery was not the only old friend

to grace the new series. The eighth film, The

Adventure of the Royal Ruby, featured both

the late Freddie Treves and Stephanie Cole,

both of whom I had known for a long time.

Freddie served in the merchant navy during

the Second World War, and was awarded the

British Empire Medal for bravery, which

somehow led him to play a series of military

officers after training at RADA. Stephanie, on

the other hand, seemed to have been

playing elderly ladies from her late thirties,

not least in the BBC television series Tenko

and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads . Both

helped the story of The Royal Ruby a great

deal, and I was delighted that such fine

actors wanted to be in the series.

Originally called The Adventure of the

Christmas Pudding when it was first

published in Britain in 1960, The Royal Ruby

opens with Poirot delighting in being able to

spend Christmas alone with a specially

selected box of his favourite Belgian

chocolates. But his plans are upset when he

is asked by the British government to

investigate the theft of a priceless stone that

belongs to Prince Farouk, a member of the

Egyptian royal family. Poirot discovers the

Prince has given it to a mysterious young

woman, and follows her to the country home

of a noted Egyptologist, played by Freddie,

with Stephanie as his wife.

My very favourite moment comes when

everyone sits down to dinner on Christmas

Eve and Poirot demonstrates exactly how to

prepare and eat a mango. In fact, I asked for

the scene to be put into the film and I must

explain why.

In April 1990, just a few weeks before we

were to start filming Poirot again, I received

a letter from Buckingham Palace inviting me

to a ‘private’ lunch with Her Majesty on 2

May, which was my forty-fourth birthday.

Both Sheila and I were astonished, and I

even asked her, partly as a joke, whether

she thought it might be a hoax. But when

Sheila rang the number in the letter, it

turned out to be absolutely true.

And so it was that I found myself having

lunch with the Queen and the Duke of

Edinburgh on my birthday that year. There

were twelve guests in all, and I discovered

that Her Majesty likes to invite people from

all walks of life that she finds interesting.

During lunch, I was deep in discussion with

Prince Philip, who was sitting three chairs

along from me on my side of the table,

opposite the Queen, when I heard someone

whisper in my left ear, ‘Would you care for

some fruit, sir?’

Without looking round, I nodded and put

my hand into the giant fruit bowl that was

being offered and I picked up something and

put it on the plate in front of me. Then I

looked down in horror. Without knowing it, I

had picked a mango. I was horrified – I did

not have any idea at all about how to peel it,

or eat it, in ‘polite company’.

Suffering from an acute attack of nerves, I

turned to the Duke and confessed, ‘Sir, I find

myself in a most embarrassing situation – I

wonder if you could help me. I am most

terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t have the

slightest idea how to deal with this mango.’

That provoked an enormous laugh from

Prince Philip, who replied immediately, ‘Well,

let me show you.’

The Duke proceeded to take another

mango and show me exactly what I should

do. He took a sharp knife and put the tip into

the mango until he could feel the pip at its

centre. Then he went round the fruit, with

the tip of the knife still held against the pip,

until the mango was effectively in two

halves, though still attached to the pip.

He then removed the knife, and placed a

dessert spoon through the cut until he could

feel the pip. He then used the spoon to

loosen the pip from one side, and then

repeated this on the other.

‘Once you’ve done this,’ he told me with a

smile, ‘you will be able to twist the two parts

of the fruit apart. You then remove the pip

altogether and cut across the soft fruit in the

centre of both parts with a sharp knife.

‘Once you have done that, you can turn

each half inside out with your thumbs, so

that the skin of each half is on the plate with

the fruit uppermost. Then you can eat the

mango.’

I was tremendously relieved that I wasn’t

left floundering and was now able to eat the

mango in front of me.

Sean was driving me that day, and when I

got back into the car after lunch, I

immediately rang Brian Eastman to tell him

the story and say that we simply had to

include it in the dinner that formed part of

the story of The Royal Ruby.

There is even a little joke about it in the

film itself. When one of the dinner guests

asks how Poirot knows how to treat a

mango, the screenwriter Anthony Horowitz

wrote the line, ‘A certain duke taught me.’

We sent a copy of the finished film to

Buckingham Palace on DVD, and I’m thrilled

to say that it became the late Queen

Mother’s favourite film. Indeed, whenever

I’ve met the Duke of Edinburgh since that

lunch, he always calls me ‘the mango man’.

I remember being tremendously pleased

by the production values on display in the

penultimate film of the series. The Affair at

the Victory Ball, for example, needed a

lavish set for a fancy-dress extravaganza to

which every guest is supposed to come

‘dressed as someone famous’. Poirot insists

that he is quite famous enough to go as

himself, though, in a little joke, Hastings

decides to go as the Scarlet Pimpernel. The

opening shots of the film focus on a set of

beautiful pottery figures of the characters

from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. When

two of the guests, who are dressed as

characters from the Commedia, are found

dead, Poirot finds himself helping Japp to

reveal the murderer. At the end of the shoot,

I was given the mock porcelain figures as a

present, which I still have.

Part of the story of The Victory Ball takes

place in a radio studio – and includes a little

joke when one character in Andrew

Marshall’s script insists, ‘Actors never know

when to stop.’ In fact, the denouement is

held in a studio and broadcast live to the

listening audience, with Poirot reconstructing

what happened at the ball. Yet, no matter

what the script may have suggested, Poirot

knows exactly when to stop, no matter the

temptation of a studio and a microphone.

The last story broadcast in the third series,

The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge, is set during

a grouse shoot on a moor in Yorkshire. It

originally appeared in Dame Agatha’s first

collection

of

short

stories, Poirot

Investigates, in 1923, a collection that came

into existence after being commissioned by

the editor of the London-based illustrated

weekly the Sketch. The stories appeared

weekly before they were published in book

form, much as the Sherlock Holmes stories

had done in the Strand Magazine nearly

thirty years earlier.

The shoot itself was cold, very cold. The

temperature on the Yorkshire moors was

freezing, and I kept falling off the shooting

stick Poirot was supposed to be sitting on,

because the ground was so soft after a long

period of rain that my stick would not stay in

place. On one occasion, it took the

production team twenty minutes to clean me

up again, as Poirot must never appear to be

dirty, of course. In the film, Poirot catches a

cold – just as I inevitably did. That happened

many times over the years that I played him.

I always seemed to catch whatever it was

Poirot was supposed to have, and this was

one of those cases. I remember it as one of

the coldest shoots I had ever been on –

there was snow on the ground and I was

shivering, in spite of taking the precaution of

wearing thermal underwear under my

padding.

In the end, Poirot retires to bed in his

hotel to recover, leaving Hastings and Japp

to track down the murderer of the wealthy

landowner of Harrington Place, who is

holding the shoot on his land. But Poirot and

I recovered sufficiently to uncover the killer

in a denouement in front of the family living

at Hunter’s Lodge.

The shoot for the third series came to an

end shortly before Christmas 1990, and the

first film was due to be broadcast by London

Weekend on Sunday, 6 January 1991. Yet

again, it was an astonishingly quick

turnaround for such complicated films – the

last of the ten was to go out on 10 March –

and the decision to televise them so quickly

after we had finished filming meant that we

always seemed to be rushing to finish one

before immediately starting the next.

I remember thinking, as Sean and I drove

back to Pinner, ‘How many actors have had