Poirot and Me (35 page)

Death on the Nile every bit as glamorous a

scheduling, screening it on Easter Monday,

12 April 2004, again at nine in the evening.

T h e Daily Mail called it ‘Murder most

pleasing’, with Peter Paterson praising its

‘excellent cast’ and concluding that he

thoroughly enjoyed ‘this skittish production

which half-guyed the Christie formula while

remaining faithful to it’.

By

coincidence,

another

British

broadcaster, Channel 4, had screened the

Ustinov version on the Saturday evening

before ours went out on the Monday, and

this caught the eye of some of the reviewers.

Charlie Catchpole, in the Daily Express,

pointed out the contrast, saying that while

Channel 4 had ‘wheeled out the 1978 film of

Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit for what

seemed like the one hundredth time’, ours –

by comparison – was a ‘sumptuous treat,

which made the movie look stagey and

laborious’.

To underline the three main production

companies’ confidence in Death on the Nile,

they had arranged a special screening of the

film at the Marché International des Films et

des Programmes Pour la Télévision festival

(always known as MIP in the trade) in

Cannes the month after its British broadcast

at Easter. The aim was to introduce the new-

style Poirot to television buyers around the

world, and there were very good reasons to

do so.

By then, the Poirot series had sold to

eighty-three countries around the world, and

had been one of the bestselling British

programmes internationally for nearly a

decade. Granada International, which was

responsible for selling the film to other

countries,

seized

the

opportunity

to

demonstrate to 4,000 television buyers

exactly how what was now known as Agatha

Christie: Poirot had improved, and become a

television event in the process. I was only

too happy to go along to support them in

doing so.

The Hollow, the final film of the new series

of four, was given just as good a send-off by

ITV, being broadcast on Bank Holiday

Monday, 30 August 2004, at nine in the

evening. Yet, in spite of the excellent cast,

the reviews were less overwhelming. The

Times commented rather sadly, ‘Poirot is

becoming like a game of charades after

dinner – you’re either in the mood or you

just can’t be bothered to play along,’ while

James Watson, in the Daily Telegraph,

added, ‘Unfortunately, for all the fun along

the way, nobody involved could disguise the

obvious flaw: that, as Christie plots go,

yesterday’s was rather routine.’

That was not the view of the film’s actors,

however. After the filming, both Sarah Miles

and Edward Fox wrote to me to say how

much they had enjoyed making The Hollow.

I was very touched, just as I was proud of

the film.

But the critics’ muted reaction did nothing

to stem the enthusiasm for the programmes

around the world, as the new series sold

even

more

successfully

than

its

predecessors. Suddenly everyone involved

with Poirot seemed rejuvenated, and ITV

rapidly decided to make another four films,

which we shot during 2005.

The success of the first of the new-style

series had reinvigorated me too. It now

seemed possible, if not entirely certain, that

I might actually be able to play in all of

Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories, as I had

wanted for so long. I told one interviewer at

the time that I would like to do it before I

reached the age of sixty-five, which would be

in 2011. I did not know then that it would

take a couple more years before I would

finally make my dream come true.

The first of the second series of Poirot

under the new production team was The

Mystery of the Blue Train, another of Dame

Agatha’s great set-piece mysteries, although

she herself did not care for it, calling it

‘easily the worst book I ever wrote’, in a

newspaper interview in 1966, and adding, ‘I

hate it.’ She was being far too hard on

herself and her story.

There can be no denying, however, that

Dame Agatha wrote it during one of the

least happy periods of her life, when she was

on holiday with her daughter Rosalind in

February 1927 on the Canary Islands – and

that may well have coloured her opinion of

her story. She was writing it in the wake of

her separation from Archie and her eleven-

day disappearance. Heartache must have

taken its toll on her attitude. What is certain

is that she did not enjoy writing it for one

moment, and only did so because she had an

obligation to her publisher.

But it marked a turning point in her career.

As she was to explain many years later in

her autobiography, ‘That was the moment

when I changed from an amateur to a

professional. I assumed the burden of a

profession, which is to write even when you

don’t want to, don’t much like what you are

writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.’

In fact, the book was to sell 7,000 copies in

hardback in its first edition in Britain, doing

just as well as her previous book had done.

It was published in March 1928 in Britain,

and later that same year in the United

States.

The following month, Dame Agatha was

granted a divorce, and almost immediately

afterwards Archie married long-term mistress

Nancy Neele. The two were to remain

married until 1958, when Nancy died of

cancer, and Archie himself died just four

years later. In the wake of her divorce,

Dame Agatha wanted to stop using her

husband’s name for her books, but her

publishers in both Britain and the United

States were firmly against any change, as

she was already so well established. As a

result, she remained Agatha Christie to her

readers for the rest of her life.

For our new version of The Mystery of the

Blue Train, Guy Andrews, the screenwriter,

took a number of liberties with the details of

Dame Agatha’s original story, not least in

adding characters that were never there in

the first place, to expand the story, and

moving it from the 1920s to the 1930s.

Hettie Macdonald, who was new to the

series, took charge of the project, to bring it

a sharper, more contemporary feel.

Once again, there was to be no Hastings,

Japp or Miss Lemon, but the producers gave

me a spectacular cast, including Lindsay

Duncan, Roger Lloyd-Pack and Nicholas

Farrell from Britain, as well as a real movie

star, Elliott Gould, from the United States. I

was thrilled to have Elliott with us, and I

discovered later that he had been dying to

be in a Poirot and was delighted to be asked.

The cast was so good that I had to pinch

myself. Here I was, appearing with an iconic

movie star, a man who was a cult in

Hollywood, in a Poirot. What’s more, he

seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.

We filmed in Menton in the south of

France, which stood in for Nice, the train’s

destination, as well as on a set at

Shepperton in England, which was built to

the precise dimensions of the train itself, so

that we could feel the claustrophobia of the

carriages and the corridors. But for the

exteriors of the train, we spent some time in

Peterborough in England, which had some of

the original carriages from the Blue Train

itself, though it didn’t have quite the climate

of the Côte d’Azur.

In spite of Dame Agatha’s dislike for the

story, our version certainly remains one of

my favourites. It is a little dark, but it

nevertheless

contains

some

wonderful

performances, not just by Elliott Gould, but

also by Lindsay Duncan and British actor

Trevor Eve’s talented daughter Alice. There

was also a haunting musical score by

Stephen McKeon to add to the atmosphere.

It is one of the films I look back on today

with real pleasure.

The second in the new series that we

filmed in 2005 was After the Funeral, which

had been published in the British Coronation

year of 1953, and the following year in the

United States – where it was called Funerals

Are Fatal. It is another of Dame Agatha’s

portraits of a dysfunctional family, where

everyone seems to be at each other’s

throats.

Indeed,

in

this

story,

the

relationships between the family members

are so complicated that Dame Agatha

thought it wise to include a complete family

tree in her book, to help the reader sort out

exactly who was who.

Once again, Poirot is acting alone, called

in to investigate a change to the will of the

wealthy Richard Abernethie, whose surviving

sister remarks to her relatives at the official

reading of the will, ‘But he was murdered,

wasn’t he?’ Until then, it had been assumed

by everyone that he had died of natural

causes. The family solicitor calls Poirot.

And, once again, the cast was wonderful.

Geraldine James, who had played my

character’s wife in Blott on the Landscape

and had also done the ITV thriller Seesaw

with me, Anna Calder-Marshall, Anthony

Valentine, and – perhaps the most exciting

of all – a young Michael Fassbender, who

was to go on to have a tremendous career in

Hollywood as one of the new generation of

dashing leading men, in films like Inglourious

Basterds and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.

Michael had also appeared with me in the

BBC crime drama NCS.

Once again, there were a number of

substantial changes from Dame Agatha’s

original story, and our new screenwriter,

Philomena McDonagh, also took some

trouble to delve even deeper into Poirot’s

psyche, giving me a line of dialogue which

reveals his intense sense of loneliness, which

we had gradually been revealing in the last

series. She has Poirot say, ‘The journey of

life, it can be hard for those who travel

alone.’

Mind you, in the original book, Dame

Agatha also reveals a little more of Poirot’s

complex character when she has him say,

‘Women are never kind, though they can

sometimes be tender.’ That is not the

remark of a misogynist, but rather the view

of a man who does not experience sexual

attraction. Poirot, for me, was never in the

least interested in sex, although he could

recognise the symptoms of desire in others.

He was sceptical about romance, with the

exception, perhaps, of Countess Rossakoff

and

Virginie

Mesnard,

and

a

touch

sentimental when it came to motherly

affection, but from the waist down, he did

not really exist. His life remained firmly

based on his logic and his ‘little grey cells’,

which brought him his unique powers of

deduction and his acute perception of

character in other people.

That is part of Dame Agatha’s genius. She

writes wonderful characters, and it is they

who sustain the readers’ or viewers’ interest

as the plot develops. She has total

understanding for the minds of the people

she writes about, and she endows Poirot

with her understanding, and then allows him

to demonstrate it – particularly in the

denouements to her stories.

You see, I think, and it is only my view,

that she started her stories from the end and

worked backwards towards the beginning as

she developed them. She thought of a plot,

and who might have committed the crime,

but then travelled back with the idea, which

she worked into a story, peopling every