Authors: David Suchet,Geoffrey Wansell
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
series
after Blott
on
the
Landscape. In my heart, I still thought of
myself as a rather serious classical actor.
Could I mix the two? Could I be both Poirot
and Iago?
On Monday morning I realised that I could,
or at least the critics thought I could. They
loved the show, and so, apparently, did the
audience. London Weekend rang to tell me
that more than eight million people had
watched it the night before, a huge
proportion of the television audience in the
country.
As I looked at some of the reviews in the
papers, I said to Sheila, ‘I cannot believe
what I’m reading. It is quite extraordinary.’ I
think she was as surprised as I was.
In the Daily Express, for example, Antonia
Swinson called my portrayal of Poirot
‘definitive’, and added that I’d ‘stepped
nimbly into the role, with a beautiful set of
moustaches, and every tiny detail of his
appearance and personality perfect. Poirot
now lives.’
Jaci Stephen, in that afternoon’s London
Evening Standard, called me ‘brilliant’ and
added, ‘More than any of his predecessors,
he brought to the Belgian detective’s
character an entertaining mix of humour,
inquisitiveness and pedantry.’
My mind went back to the previous
summer on the Isles of Scilly, when Geoffrey
had told me that Poirot would change my
life. Although I still did not quite realise how
much, that Monday morning in January 1989
showed beyond doubt that it had. Nothing
was ever to be quite the same again.
To prove it, on the Tuesday morning, I
was scheduled to have breakfast at the Ritz
Hotel in London with a man from the Daily
Telegraph
called
Hugh
Montgomery-
Massingberd. Hugh could clearly see that I
was in a state of shock. His interview with
me appeared the following morning, and
neatly captured the new world that I
suddenly found myself inhabiting.
‘With the fame that only the telly can
bestow,’ Hugh wrote, ‘David Suchet, alias
Hercule Poirot, woke up yesterday morning
to find himself a household name.’
Though we had never met before, Hugh and
I got on terribly well at that breakfast – even
though we only had fruit and muesli, as we
were both on a diet – and he kindly
concluded by describing me as ‘most
sympathetic and unactorish’ as well as a
‘sensitive and unshowy artist’ who was
‘surely a major star of the future’.
I was stunned when I read that the
following morning.
The good reviews kept on coming. The
following Sunday, Alan Coren in the Mail on
Sunday suggested that ‘by homing in
unerringly on the most telegenic of Poirot’s
quirks’, I had succeeded in making the
character entirely my own.
As the reviews flowed, so did the fan
letters. Suddenly people I did not know were
writing to me as though I were a long-lost
friend, and that started a train of thought in
my mind that has remained with me ever
since – what was it that people liked about
Poirot?
I am convinced that the reaction to my
work in that first series was more to do with
Poirot than me. The reason the reviews were
so flattering was because it was Dame
Agatha’s Poirot that mattered to them, not
me. It was she and her creation that won
their hearts and minds.
The fact that he had a kind heart was her
work, not mine. The fact that he was always
polite and respectful towards women was
her doing, not mine, as was his charm and
gentleness towards servants and waiters. His
tendency to choose the wrong words – and
allow himself to be corrected by Hastings –
was her idea, not mine, as was his acute
awareness of his fellow characters’ sadness
from time to time.
What I was doing was communicating
Poirot’s character to the world, and that was
my job – to serve my original creator and my
script writer.
In those first days after the series had
begun on ITV, I realised for the first time
that Poirot touches people’s hearts in a way
that I had never anticipated when I started
to play him. I cannot put my finger on
precisely how he does it, but somehow he
makes those who watch him feel secure.
People see him and feel better. I don’t know
exactly why that is, but there is something
about him. My performance had touched that
nerve.
That showed only too clearly in the
audience’s reaction. My mail bag of fan
letters exploded overnight. Within a few
weeks of the series starting in 1989, I was
getting a hundred letters a week. Many of
them were deeply touching.
It was like being hit over the head with a
mallet. I did not know what had happened.
The show’s success was a joy, but I still
was not sure whether there would ever be
another series, and I was an actor with a
family to support. The reviews and fan
letters were wonderful, but I had to work.
In fact, I had agreed to do two pieces for
television: a screen version of Tom
Kempinski’s Separation, the play I had done
at Hampstead and at the Comedy Theatre
not all that long before Poirot started, and a
new production of Edward Bond’s Bingo, in
which I was to play William Shakespeare. I
was to portray him as a manic-depressive
genius who had retired to Stratford-upon-
Avon as a rich and disillusioned man.
Both parts could hardly have been further
from Poirot, but they proved to me that my
peers in the profession saw me as a
character actor who could transform himself.
I hoped the British public did too.
Mind you, my new found ‘fame’ took me to
some strange places. Not long after the first
series started, Sheila and I found ourselves
featured in Hello! magazine, hardly a place
that we thought that we would ever appear.
We were photographed in our new house in
Pinner, rather as though we were some sort
of minor foreign royalty, which was a
decidedly surreal experience, not least
because the magazine suggested I was in ‘a
heady haze of euphoria’ over my ‘worldwide
success’.
Nothing could have been further from the
truth. It would have been more accurate to
say that, far from being euphoric, Sheila and
I were desperately worried about whether
we would be able to stay in our house.
London Weekend, as a part of the ITV
network, had an option for Brian Eastman to
produce and me to play a second series of
ten Poirot films, but they had not exercised
their options yet, which meant our financial
position was still not exactly secure.
Would there ever be any more work?
Could we pay the mortgage and the bills? I
should confess that in the nineteen years
before my first series as Poirot, I had never
earned very much. I may have been a
character actor with what I think was a good
reputation, but I certainly was not a rich one.
It was not until late in February 1989 that
ITV confirmed that they actually wanted to
do a second series – on an almost identical
schedule to the first. They were anxious for
me to film another ten stories between early
July and Christmas 1989, which they would
broadcast between January and March 1990.
This time, Nick Elliott at London Weekend,
who had been the executive producer on the
first series with his colleague Linda Agran,
wanted Brian Eastman to deliver an opening
two-hour film, to be broadcast in early
January 1990, based on Dame Agatha’s
magnificent Cornish mystery Peril at End
House, and then a one-hour story for the
each of the following eight Sundays. My
Poirot was to become the cornerstone of
ITV’s Sunday nights.
It wasn’t the critics that had convinced
London Weekend to commission another
series – though they were as thrilled by their
reviews as I was. It was down to the fact
that the viewing figures for each Sunday
evening had stayed in their millions, and had
even edged up from time to time. The series
had also begun to sell around the world. As
well as Canada and the United States, it
looked as though other countries, particularly
in Europe, were interested. Belgium had
already started transmitting the films.
As a result of that worldwide audience, in
addition to Peril at End House and the eight
stories, London Weekend wanted Brian to
produce a full-length special at the end of
the second series: the very first Poirot story,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles – the first
book that Dame Agatha ever published. It
was to be broadcast later in 1990, to
celebrate the centenary of her birth.
The decision to commission a second
series was a great compliment, as it would
firmly establish my Poirot in the public
consciousness, but it was also a great relief.
It meant we would be able to stay in our
house – at least for another year. Elmdene,
as it was called, was becoming the house
that Poirot built.
Just as importantly, however, the second
series meant that I was going to become
‘that little man’ again, which made me truly
happy. No matter what my fears might have
been as an actor, I certainly wasn’t ready to
say goodbye to Hercule Poirot. I’d come to
care about him far, far too much for that.
Chapter 6
‘I WANTED HIM TO
BECOME EVEN MORE
HUMAN’
It was another hot summer’s day, this
time in late June 1989, when I became
Hercule Poirot for the second time, and
climbed back into my padding and his
immaculate
clothes
to
resume
my
relationship with the little man who had
swept into my life, knocked me off my feet
and come to mean so much to me.
And, once again, I would be revealing his
foibles alongside my own, and sharing his
obsessions with mine. For I was sure that
this time the closeness between us would be
revealed even more than it had been just a
few months earlier, during the first series.
The first of the second series was to be
the two-hour special, Peril at End House,
shot partly on location, which opened with
Poirot on an aeroplane on his way to a
holiday in the west of England – and plainly
not enjoying it at all. In fact, Poirot is feeling
very uncomfortable indeed, because he does
not like flying and makes no secret of the
fact, while Hastings is sitting beside him
looking serene and untroubled. In the
character notes I had written about Poirot
before the first series, I had at number six:
‘Hates to fly. Makes him feel sick,’ and so the
scene was a perfect cameo of one of his little
idiosyncrasies.
Dame Agatha wrote the full-length novel
on which the film was based in 1932, and
many of her admirers regard it as one of her
finest murder-mysteries, even though in her
own autobiography, published more than
forty years later, she confessed that it had
made so little impression on her that she
could not even remember having written it.
That led some commentators to mistakenly
undervalue what is, to me, one of her most
ingenious stories.
Poirot and Hastings are taking a holiday at
‘the Queen of Watering Places’ on the south-
west coast of England, the fictional St Loo in
Cornwall, where they are staying at the
Majestic Hotel, which reminds Hastings of
the French Riviera. A good proportion of the
film was actually shot on location in
Salcombe in Devon, rather than the studio,
but the interesting thing for me was that
Dame Agatha almost certainly used her own
experience of the Imperial Hotel in Torquay,
her birthplace, as part of its inspiration.