Poirot and Me (23 page)

in London with exactly the same name, and

where exactly the same group of characters

that had been in Buenos Aires are reunited.

The story includes another of Dame

Agatha’s poisonings, and takes place almost

entirely in the restaurant, which also

features a cabaret with a singer, just as the

original short story did, though she does not

sing the lines written for her by Dame

Agatha.

Thinking about The Yellow Iris now, it

reminds

me

that

her

greatest

fans

sometimes object when we depart from her

original story in the television films – and

they write to tell me so. I always reply by

telling them that I am terribly sorry, but not

all of her stories adapt easily to the small

screen, they are simply too slight, which is

why we describe them as ‘based on’ her

originals. I think her die-hard fans forgive us

for the adaptations, but I do understand how

they feel.

The next two films, The Case of the

Missing Will and The Adventure of the Italian

Nobleman, were both stories that originally

appeared in the Daily Sketch and were later

published in Poirot Investigates, in 1924.

Neither were tremendously strong stories,

and both needed more than a little

adaptation to make the transition to

television.

What was most interesting to me about

these stories was that, at this point in

Poirot’s history, Dame Agatha was carefully

developing his character, not only to allow

her readers to discover his foibles, but also

for them to grasp a sense of his beliefs. This

is true of The Case of the Missing Will in

particular, where one of the characters is a

staunch feminist who believes that women

should have the right to a university

education, something Poirot wholeheartedly

agrees with.

When I first started reading Poirot, I relied

on these early stories to help me to

understand him better, which was lucky for

me, for as time went by and her audience

grew to know him better, she reduced the

amount of time she spent revealing his

idiosyncrasies. By then, her audience had

come to know them only too well.

The sixth film was one of my favourites,

and remains so to this day. The Chocolate

Box, which was originally known as The Clue

of the Chocolate Box, first appeared in the

Daily Sketch in 1923 and was then collected

i n Poirot Investigates. It is a simply

wonderful story about Poirot’s return to

Brussels with Inspector Japp – the Scotland

Yard detective is to receive a grand award –

which reminds Poirot of a case when he was

still an officer in the Belgian detective force.

In the original story, Poirot’s reminiscence is

told in flashback, and the screenwriter,

Douglas Watkinson again, had Philip Jackson

and I travel to Brussels together to launch

the story.

That made it very special for me. It was

wonderful to go to Belgium, because I truly

felt that I was returning to my homeland as

Poirot. By then, I had discovered that he was

born in the town of Spa in the principality of

Liège, sometime between 1854 and 1856,

and the film gave me the opportunity to

unveil his character as a younger man and

reveal something about his past. Just as

exciting was the fact that I was to be

dressed in a police uniform for the flashbacks

in the 1890s, which allowed me to escape

my padding, and even to renounce the walk

I had used for so long playing him as an

older man – remember, he was in his middle

sixties when he was first discovered in The

Mysterious Affair at Styles.

The story also gave me the chance to

show Poirot’s emotional side, for as part of

the film, he loses his heart to a young

woman, Mademoiselle Virginie Mesnard, who

asks him to investigate a case of what may

be murder, but is being called a natural

death by the doctors. Virginie was played by

the lovely Anna Chancellor, then still just

twenty-seven, the year before she leapt to

prominence as Henrietta, or ‘Duckface’, as

she was known, in Richard Curtis’s award-

winning film Four Weddings and a Funeral .

Then still in her bohemian period, Anna was

quite superb in our film, bewitching the

younger Poirot completely, and presenting

him with the tiny silver vase for his lapel that

he wore filled with wild flowers from that day

onwards.

In fact, that never happened in Dame

Agatha’s original story, but was another

example of the screenwriter allowing Poirot

an opportunity to display rather more of

himself to the audience on television than he

did in the original story. Filming it made me

truly happy, for there was Poirot as a

younger man, pursuing the case against the

wishes of his superiors, losing his heart to

Virginie, even running through the streets of

Brussels – not something the older Hercule

Poirot would ever have allowed himself to

do. It was a breath of fresh air, and a joy to

do.

Anna’s was not the only memorable

performance in The Chocolate Box, for the

director, Andrew Grieve, also had the

incomparable Rosalie Crutchley playing an

elderly matriarch. Then in her early

seventies, Rosalie was a legend of both

British films and television, having played

Acte alongside Peter Ustinov’s Nero in the

1951 epic Quo Vadis and Madame Defarge in

the 1958 version of A Tale of Two Cities ,

alongside Dirk Bogarde. She had even

played Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine

Parr, in not one but two television series in

the early 70s.

With her olive complexion and sad, dark

eyes, Rosalie was capable of commanding

the screen while doing almost nothing. As an

actor, you simply could not ignore her

strength, which communicated itself to the

audience almost subliminally. She was

superb in our film, though sadly she was to

die only five years later, at the age of just

seventy-seven. One of the delights of the

filming was that I managed to photograph

both Rosalie and Anna during breaks in the

shooting, as I had begun to return to my old

hobby of photography in what few spare

moments I had.

Sadly, the last two films of our fifth series

were not quite of the same exquisite quality

as The Chocolate Box.

Dead Man’s Mirror was a long short story

that had first appeared in book form in a

collection called Murder in the Mews in 1937,

although it was, in fact, an expanded version

of another of her stories, The Second Gong,

which was first published in the magazines

Ladies’ Home Journal and the Strand in

1932. A locked room mystery – another of

Dame Agatha’s favourite plot devices – it

centres on a rather pompous collector of Art

Deco who outbids Poirot for a mirror at a

London auction and then asks to consult him

because he suspects that he is being

defrauded by his architect. Poirot visits him –

only for the collector to be found dead, in

what looks like suicide, locked in his study.

The striking of the gong which calls the

house guests down to dinner plays a

significant role in the denouement, but it is a

gentle story rather than one to set the blood

racing.

The same could also be said for Jewel

Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan, another

of the short stories from the Daily Sketch to

be collected for Poirot Investigates. The

original title was The Curious Disappearance

of the Opalsen Pearls, which is a rather more

accurate indication of the story, as it focuses

on a theatre producer who purchases some

expensive jewels at auction for his wife, who

is an actress, to wear in his production of a

new play called Pearls Before Swine. Poirot

only gets involved because he has been

forced to take a holiday due to overwork and

finds himself in Brighton, staying at the

Grand Metropolitan Hotel, together with the

producer and his wife, at the time the play

has its premiere. The jewels go missing,

encouraging Poirot to overcome his illness to

recover them.

In the original story, the pearls were

purchased by a rich stockbroker ‘who made a

fortune in the recent oil boom’, but the

screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, turned him

into a theatrical producer, thereby allowing

the denouement to take place in a theatre, a

place that Dame Agatha used several times

in her stories, although not in this one in its

original version. Filmed in Brighton, it used

another of her favourite devices – how the

pearls could have disappeared from a locked

box when the maid who was guarding them

never let the box out of her sight. Another

slight story, it lacked the energy and force of

The Yellow Iris and The Chocolate Box.

Perhaps it had something to do with the

death of my mother, I cannot be sure, but by

the time we came to the end of the series, I

was not entirely happy with what I had

done. The stories worked, of course,

especially The Chocolate Box, but I had a

sinking feeling. I was not sure they were as

quite as good as I could have made them. I

was satisfied with my performances, but felt

as though perhaps – like Poirot in the last

film – I needed a break.

In this reflective mood, I went back to

Pinner for a rest. I was not sure what to do

next; nor, for that matter, exactly what I

wanted to do. I certainly was not ready to

give up Poirot, but there was something

troubling me. Yet again, there was no

indication from London Weekend about the

future. My agent had given them a deadline

in February 1993, by which they had to tell

me their Poirot plans for the coming year,

but they had not taken out an option for me

to play the role again. That was familiar

enough. The only option that they had ever

taken out was for me to do a second series

after the first. Since then, I had been left in

limbo every year. But this time I was

restless, not completely happy with myself,

and was waiting, waiting, waiting to discover

what would happen to Poirot and me.

With nothing firm on my horizon, I

accepted the role of the flamboyant

Viennese business man Rudi Waltz in English

director Jack Gold’s film The Lucona Affair, a

fictional account of a huge Austrian political

scandal. It was based on the bombing of the

cargo ship Lucona in the Indian Ocean in

1977, which had been chartered by my

character, who then tried to claim £13

million in compensation for the loss from an

insurance company. It set off one of the

great financial and political dramas in

modern Austrian history. In reality, the

Austrian Minister of Defence committed

suicide after it was discovered that he had

allowed the bomb onto the ship, and several

other ex-ministers were imprisoned for

covering up the affair.

My co-star was the Italian Franco Nero,

who had made his reputation in the 1970

version of D. H. Lawrence’s novella The

Virgin and the Gypsy, and had famously

fallen in love with Britain’s Vanessa

Redgrave in the 1960s, in the wake of her

divorce from director Tony Richardson.

Franco’s career had continued apace. In

1990 he had even appeared in the

Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard 2, alongside

Bruce Willis, although most of his work for

the cinema was produced in Europe rather

than in the United States. The Lucona Affair

was a European production, with a large

German and Austrian cast and crew, in spite

of the presence of Jack Gold and me

representing England.

Poirot was still there in the background,

however. I simply could not ignore the little