Poirot and Me (38 page)

baron called Lew Vogel, with some

tremendous dialogue from Dick and Ian.

Something must have worked, because it

reached number one at the British box office

when it was released in February 2008.

By the time filming was over, and just

after Maxwell was transmitted on BBC2 on 4

May 2007, there was still no sign of any

further Poirots, and so I went back to the

theatre and rehearsals for a new play at the

Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex.

Written by an American lawyer, Roger Crane,

and called The Last Confession, it was a

thriller about the election of Pope John Paul I

in 1978, and I was playing the power-

broking, though God-doubting, Cardinal

Giovanni Benelli, who engineers the election

of the Cardinal of Venice, Albino Luciani, to

his short-lived papacy as John Paul I. He

died just thirty-three days after his election,

among rumours that he may have been

murdered.

The company took this portrait of Vatican

politics at their most Machiavellian on tour in

England, visiting Plymouth, Bath, Malvern

and Milton Keynes, before arriving at the

Theatre Royal in London for a limited run

between 28 June and 15 September 2007.

Most of the national theatre critics liked

David Jones’s production, with The Times

capturing precisely what I had in mind for

the part. ‘Suchet’s Benelli is a darkly silky

creature,’ their critic wrote, ‘rent by a

mounting crisis of faith and by his guilt over

his

unwitting

complicity

in

Luciani’s

destruction.’ Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph

suggested that I had managed to give

‘another compelling portrait of power’ in the

wake of my performance as Robert Maxwell.

In November 2008, I was lucky enough to

win the International Emmy Award for best

performance by an actor for my portrait of

Maxwell, at the thirty-sixth annual awards

ceremony of the International Academy of

Television Arts and Sciences in New York.

During the run of The Last Confession, ITV

finally decided that they did indeed want to

do another four Poirot films, ending with one

of her best ‘foreign’ stories, Appointment

with Death, set on an archaeological dig in

Egypt. And so, in the early autumn of 2007,

Sean and I found ourselves driving to the

Poirot set again, though no longer from the

house in Pinner. In March 2006, Sheila and I

had decided to move back to London, to a

flat by the Thames, after nearly twenty years

in the suburbs. The children had grown up,

and we did not need the same amount of

space and quiet that we had enjoyed when

they were young. Besides, we wanted to go

to the theatre again, and being in London

made that a lot easier.

The first of the eleventh series of Poirot

films was to be Dame Agatha’s Mrs McGinty’s

Dead, which was first published in America

as Blood Will Tell . She had written the novel

in 1952, the year in which her record-

breaking play, The Mousetrap, first appeared

in the West End of London, where it is

running still. Indeed, she dedicated the book

to Peter Saunders, who had produced her

play, ‘in gratitude for his kindness to

authors’. Originally set in post-war Britain,

describing some of the hardships that the

now impoverished middle-classes had to

contend

with,

it

re-introduced

Dame

Agatha’s fictional alter ego, the crime

novelist Ariadne Oliver, who had first

appeared in Cards on the Table.

By now, Ariadne is as fed up with her

Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson, as Dame

Agatha had privately become with Hercule

Poirot. In her novel, she even has her

fictional novelist explain, ‘Fond of him? If I

met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating

Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than

any I’ve ever invented.’ I am sure that there

were moments when Dame Agatha felt

exactly the same way about Hercule Poirot.

In the introduction to the serialisation of

Appointment with Death in the Daily Mail in

1938, for example, she had memorably

remarked, ‘There are moments when I have

felt: “Why-why-why did I ever invent this

detestable,

bombastic,

tiresome

little

creature!” . . . eternally straightening things,

eternally boasting, eternally twisting his

moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head .

. . In moments of irritation, I point out that

by a few strokes of the pen . . . I could

destroy

him

utterly.

He

replies,

grandiloquently: “Impossible to get rid of

Poirot like that! He is much too clever.”’

Dame Agatha knew only too well that she

was ‘beholden to him financially’ – as she put

it – but that did nothing to prevent her, just

two years later, from writing the novel that

depicted the end of Poirot’s life, Curtain.

Reportedly, Collins became aware of the

story’s existence but did not want Poirot

killed off, and certainly she went on writing

stories about him for another thirty years.

Indeed, the story of his death was not

published until 1975, shortly before her own

death.

Given Dame Agatha’s annoyance with

Poirot at that time, it could be significant

that when Mrs McGinty’s Dead was turned

into a film, it was renamed Murder Most

Foul, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1964,

Hercule Poirot was eliminated completely

and replaced by Miss Marple, played by

Margaret Rutherford.

With Zoë Wanamaker back as Ariadne,

and directed by Ashley Pearce, from a script

by Nick Dear, who had written The Hollow,

the start of filming was like returning to the

Poirot family. I knew so many of the crew,

from the make-up ladies to the sound men,

the runners to the wardrobe mistresses. But

I was determined not to allow that sense of

family to prevent me from deepening still

further my portrait of Poirot, as I had been

doing in the past two series. As I told one

interviewer at the time, ‘I’ve discovered

quite a cruel side to him, which you’ll see at

the end of Mrs McGinty’s Dead.’

The brutal story of the murder of an

elderly cleaning lady in the fictional village of

Broadhinny, a crime for which her lodger is

convicted and sentenced to death, it calls for

Poirot to race against time to prove the

man’s innocence. It is also one of the few

stories in which the little Belgian is all but

killed, when someone tries to push him

under a train in order to prevent him

discovering the truth. The attempt provokes

a fierce reaction from Poirot, and sees him

lose his temper spectacularly, though

without losing his natural poise.

With a splendid cast, including Sian Philips

and Paul Rhys, Mrs McGinty’s Dead also

revealed something that I had not quite

grasped before. I noticed that more and

more of the actors appearing with me came

up and talked to me about my interpretation

of Poirot. They were interested in the way I

playing him. I think some of that had to do

with my profile in the theatre, which had

grown steadily since Oleanna in 1994, and

had been cemented since the last Poirot

series.

The second film in the series, which we

also filmed in the autumn of 2007, was

based on what is considered by many to be

one of Dame Agatha’s ‘finest’ of the later

Poirot novels. Published in 1959 in Britain

and the following year in the United States,

Cat Among the Pigeons is set in ‘the best

girls’ boarding school in England’, where

Poirot is asked to present the prizes at

Speech Day. The school, known as

Meadowbank in the story, is said to have

been based on the school that Dame

Agatha’s daughter Rosalind attended as a

young girl, Caledonia in Bexhill, East Sussex.

The novel was set in the 1950s, but the

screenwriter – actor and writer Mark Gatiss,

a member of the comedy writing and

performing group The League of Gentlemen,

and writer for the BBC’s Doctor Who –

moved it back to the 1930s. That was always

our practice in the films. From the very

earliest days of the series, when Brian

Eastman was the producer, it had been

agreed that we would always locate the

stories in the mid 1930s, to give the

audience a sense of time and place which

would never change.

It was one of the many reasons why the

titles would always point out that our films

were ‘based on’ Dame Agatha’s original

stories. That also allowed us to alter the

characters in some instances, and even –

though rarely – to alter the motives of one or

two of the suspects. In this case, it allowed

us to have Poirot there from the very

beginning of the story, rather than appearing

almost halfway through, as he does in the

original.

Directed by James Kent, and with another

great cast, led by Harriet Walter as the

school’s headmistress, Miss Gloria Bulstrode,

it reminded me again of the status that the

Poirot films had reached in the film and

television industry in Britain. All the actors

seemed to have a tremendous respect for

the series – and reinforced the point that

Michele Buck and Damien Timmer had made

to me when they took over: ‘We want to

make films.’ That was exactly what they had

done.

The story of Cat Among the Pigeons is a

touch gory – one mistress is killed with a

javelin, for example. But the lasting

impression that I took away from the shoot

was that I was almost the only man in it.

Anton Lesser did appear as Inspector Kelsey,

the lead policeman, but otherwise the cast

was almost entirely women. That meant that

I was almost the only man in the summing

up, speaking to a room crammed with ladies.

It was a rather an odd experience, and not

one that I had ever encountered before. The

plot itself, however, was quite familiar

territory for Dame Agatha, including jewels

stolen from an Arab prince ousted in a

revolution, a kidnapping that might not have

been

a

kidnapping,

and

a

possible

impersonation – hence ‘cat among the

pigeons’ – in a school in which nothing was

what it seemed, and everyone had a secret.

There was then a gap in the filming,

between November 2007 and the following

spring, which I must say I was grateful for,

as I had been so busy throughout the year.

We did not start filming Poirot again until the

following April, when we made The Third

Girl, one of Dame Agatha’s very last Poirot

stories, published in 1966. She had designed

it to be a commentary on the ‘modern youth’

of the ‘swinging sixties’, but, as ever, our

screenwriter, Peter Flannery, transposed the

story back to the 1930s, and it lost none of

its charm or ability to captivate with its

complexity.

The film brought the return of the

indefatigable Ariadne Oliver, whom Dame

Agatha always allowed to reflect her own

views on the ‘trade’ of being a crime

novelist. In the original story, she even has

her fictional alter ego complain about

publishers. ‘I don’t believe you know whether

anything I write is good or bad,’ she says,

though neither lady would ever have dreamt

of stopping writing for a single moment.

Directed by Dan Reed, and with a cast

that included Peter Bowles, star of the

famous BBC sitcom To the Manor Born,

James Wilby and Haydn Gwynne, it was

further evidence of the series’ power to

attract the most talented actors. The cast

were absolutely terrific, but Jemima Rooper,

the young actress playing the leading lady,