Authors: David Suchet,Geoffrey Wansell
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
films, culminating in a new version of Dame
Agatha’s classic, Murder on the Orient
Express. When Damien Timmer rang me to
tell me, I had a sense of thrill and panic
mixed together. The thrill was in making that
wonderful story again – which I had very
strong views about – but at the same time, I
was worried that I would never be able to
match Albert Finney’s masterful performance
in the 1974 film, directed by Sidney Lumet,
with its glittering all-star cast. Albert was
nominated for an Oscar as best actor for his
performance and Ingrid Bergman won one as
best supporting actress. It was a worldwide
success, and spawned a further five cinema
versions of Poirot stories, including Death on
the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment
with Death, although Peter Ustinov replaced
Albert Finney as Poirot in all the others.
But we were not going to start with Orient
Express; the first in what would become the
twelfth series would be one of Dame
Agatha’s later stories, The Clocks, published
in Britain in 1963 and the following year in
the United States. When it was first
published, Maurice Richardson noted in his
review in the Observer that it was ‘Not as
zestful as usual. Plenty of ingenuity about
the timing, though.’ Our version was going to
be a little different.
Directed by Charlie Palmer, the screenplay
was written by Stewart Harcourt, who made
a string of changes to the original novel. In
particular, in the novel, Poirot never visits
the scene of the crime and never interviews
any witnesses, to defend his often-made
boast that a crime can be solved by use of
the intellect alone. In our film, however, he
interviews every suspect and witness and
visits every crime scene, particularly the
house in a town on the Sussex coast in which
a young secretary has found a body.
Our ambition was to make it a good deal
more ‘zestful’, and I am glad to say that I
think it worked, not least because we had
another terrific cast, led by Anna Massey, in
what would be her very last role on
television, as the elderly spinster Miss
Plebmarsh. What was just as exciting for me,
however, was that we also gathered
together a group of excellent young actors,
two of whom were the son and daughter of
old colleagues in the profession.
Tom Burke, who played the leading young
man, I had known since he was a baby as I
knew his father David and his mother Anna
Calder-Marshall. David and I had worked
together
in
Shakespeare’s Measure for
Measure at the Edinburgh Festival, before
Sheila and I had married. Jaime Winston,
who played the young typist who discovers
the first body, was the daughter of London-
born actor Ray Winstone, whom I had
worked with in a BBC production of
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Add the fact that
the director was working with his father,
Geoffrey Palmer, another old friend, and it
gave me a tremendous sense of pride that
the Poirot films were attracting so many of
the next generation of actors.
The Clocks underlines Piorot’s patriotism in
his wish to defend his new home in England
against spies, and also allows him to say
something which lies at the heart of what he
believes: ‘The world is full of good people
who do bad things.’ In fact, that sentiment
lay behind much of what we were trying to
say in these four films, and culminated in the
intense moral dilemma that Poirot faces in
Murder on the Orient Express. Significantly,
Stewart Harcourt was to go on to write that
screenplay after he finished The Clocks.
The second film we made that summer in
2009 was Three Act Tragedy , which had
been published almost thirty years before
The Clocks, in 1935, and had appeared as
Murder in Three Acts in the United States the
following year. When it first appeared, the
critics had been generous, suggesting it led
its readers a merry dance before Poirot
revealed the true identity of the murderer.
Originally, Dame Agatha had divided her
novel into three acts: Suspicion, Certainty
and Discovery, but our screenwriter, Nick
Dear, did not stick to that formula for his
television version. There had been a
previous film version of the story in 1986,
starring Peter Ustinov and Tony Curtis, and
set in Acapulco, but that had no impact on
anything we were trying to do now.
It was a fine script, but what I found most
interesting was that I had begun to realise
the effect the entire Poirot series was having
on young actors. That became even clearer
to me when I arrived for the first read-
through of Nick’s script with the cast. One
young actress was so shocked to suddenly
hear me speaking in Poirot’s voice that she
screamed out loud. She could not believe
she was actually appearing in a Poirot, and it
made me think that the series must have
become something of a cult among the
younger members of my profession. That
view was confirmed by the female lead, a
lovely young actress called Kimberley Nixon,
whom, I quickly learnt, had been a fan of the
series since she was a child, and she could
hardly believe she was about to appear in
one. She was almost overwhelmed by the
whole experience, and turned out to be as
much of an aficionado of Poirot and all his
works as I was. After we had finished, I gave
her a present of one of Poirot’s stiff white
collars with one of his bow ties around it.
Not that the senior members were not
slightly affected by it as well. The producers
had been lucky enough to get Martin Shaw
to play the leading man, who is famous for a
string of television series, starting with The
Professionals in the 1970s, and then
progressing by way of Judge John Deed and
Inspector George Gently. Martin is just a
year older than I am, and the irony was that
– as a much younger man – I had even
appeared in an episode of The Professionals
alongside him, when he was a star and I
most certainly was not. This was the first
time we had acted together since then, and
it was a pleasure to have him, not least
because he gave a bravura performance as
the stage actor and matinee idol Sir George
Cartwright, who was said to have been
modelled by Dame Agatha on the great
1920s actor Sir Gerald du Maurier, the first
man to play Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan. It was entirely fitting that our
denouement should be filmed on the stage
of a theatre.
I had been so lucky to have had such good
casts, but the really important thing for me
was that the writers we were using were
now determined to reveal the strength of
Poirot’s religious faith and his moral
convictions in each of our new films. In
Three Act Tragedy , they revealed his dislike
of divorce, because of his Catholicism, and
yet also allowed him to accept the
complexities of life, leading him to say at
one point, ‘I investigate, I do not judge.’
The third of the new films, Hallowe’en
Party, was one of Dame Agatha’s very last
Poirot stories, published both in Britain and
the United States in her eightieth year, 1969.
By that time, she had begun to describe
herself as a ‘sausage machine’, adding, ‘As
soon as one is made and cut off the string, I
have to think of the next one.’ Interestingly,
she dedicated the novel to the comic writer
P. G. Wodehouse, ‘whose books and stories
have brightened my life for so many years’.
She then added, ‘Also, to show my pleasure
in his having been kind enough to tell me
that he enjoys my books.’
The story was the fourth of our films to
include Dame Agatha’s alter ego, Ariadne
Oliver, and she even allowed Poirot to
pronounce his verdict on her, which might
also have been a comment on the vision she
had of herself. ‘It is a pity she is so scatty,’
he proclaims in the novel. ‘And yet, she had
originality of mind,’ as Zoë Wanamaker
amply demonstrated during the film. It
begins with the death of a thirteen-year-old
girl who has been telling the other guests at
a Hallowe’en party that she once witnessed
a murder, only to be drowned in a tub of
floating apples. With an expectedly large
number of deaths, it is one of Dame Agatha’s
darkest stories, the depth of which was
brought out by Mark Gatiss. An expert in
dark material, it is no surprise that he added
an even darker side to Dame Agatha’s
original.
Directed again by Charlie Palmer, it
attracted another strong cast, led by
Timothy West as the local vicar and Deborah
Findlay as Rowena Drake, the host of the
party, as well as Amelia Bullmore and Julian
Rhind-Tutt. But the actor who gave me the
greatest pleasure was the extraordinary
comedian and comic writer Eric Sykes, who
was there to play a local solicitor. Eric and I
had met several years before, when I made
a documentary about the comedian Sid Field,
in the wake of the play I did about him in the
West End, and I was thrilled to be with him
again. At this point, he was eighty-six years
old, and was greeted with the most
tremendous respect by his fellow members
of the cast, as well as the crew. He gave a
simply wonderful performance, and very
generously presented me with a copy of his
autobiography at the end of filming.
Typically self-effacing, his inscription said,
‘It’s been a privilege and indeed an honour
to work with a giant in the theatre, with love
Eric.’ In fact, the privilege and honour was
entirely mine.
Yet the seriousness which had increasingly
come to inhabit Poirot and me in recent
years was all too apparent, in spite of Eric’s
insatiable appetite for comedy and good
humour. This was a story about the murder
of children, and there was no way Poirot
could ignore or dilute that terrible fact. The
denouement reflects that exactly, when he
loses his temper at the group of suspects for
their attitude to the crimes that have ‘led
this village to become a slaughterhouse’. It
is an anger that positively boils within Poirot
throughout the end of the story, and one
which I was certainly not going to ignore.
There was another trait, however, that
was also part of Poirot’s make-up, the
concept of ‘an eye for an eye’. The theme of
capital punishment runs through many of the
Poirot stories, because it underlines Poirot’s,
attitude to murder. Throughout the novels,
and the television series, there are regular
hangings – as a man, or woman, pays the
ultimate price for their crime. It is not
something that Dame Agatha shies away
from, and certainly Poirot does not either.
Remember the ending of Death on the Nile,
when it is clear that Poirot knows that the
guilty parties will kill themselves rather than
face the hangman – he both knows and
accepts it.
To allow a killer, or killers, to go free, or at
least not to face the possibility of the death
penalty, is an alien concept to Poirot. Evil is
there to be eradicated, and there can be no
escape
from
the absolute necessity of
retribution for a crime that sees a man,
woman or child lose their life to a murderer –
no matter how disgusting, avaricious, selfish
or uncaring the victim may have been.
Taking a life demanded that a life be taken
in return, that a murderer should face the
ultimate price.
The moral dilemma of whether murder can
ever be justified, and whether a killer or
killers should ever be allowed to go free, lies