Poirot and Me (29 page)

after the filming had finished, and before it

was broadcast, to play the lead detective in

a remake of Frederick Knott’s famous stage

play Dial M for Murder, which had been so

memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in

1954, starring Grace Kelly and Ray Milland.

This time, the stars were to be Michael

Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, while I was

to play the part originally made famous by

the great British character actor John

Williams. In the original play and film, the

plot took place in London, but this time the

husband’s scheme to commit the perfect

crime by killing his wife was to take place in

New York. The producers had also decided it

should be called A Perfect Murder.

The

experience

of

making Executive

Decision in 1995 and now A Perfect Murder

convinced me that making movies in

Hollywood is not quite like anything else.

The new movie’s producers invited me to

New York, where we had breakfast together.

Without any warning, they announced,

almost in unison, ‘We’re so pleased that you

can speak Arabic.’

I was a little puzzled. ‘What makes you

think that?’ I said, as I sipped my orange

juice.

‘Well, you spoke it so brilliantly in

Executive Decision.’

When I told them that I was terribly sorry

but I did not, in fact, speak any Arabic at all,

they paused for a moment.

‘You don’t? Gee. Well, at least you look

Arabic.’ I was left pretty much speechless.

The Hollywood reality is that it is the stars

that sell the tickets. There famous adage

‘Put the money on the screen’ means that if

the audience pays to see Michael Douglas,

then they want to see as much of him in the

film as they possibly can, from the very

opening scene until the end, because that

way, they are getting what they paid for.

It is the perfect reflection of that other old

Hollywood adage, ‘The thing about show

business is that the second word is business.’

Stars bring in an audience, and so they are

the vital ingredient for moviegoers, wherever

they may be in the world. They keep the film

business flowing. For a British character

actor brought up in the democratic traditions

of the Royal Shakespeare Company, that can

be a hard lesson to learn, but it is an

important one.

Making A Perfect Murder proved it to me.

Even though my part as the lead detective

was vital to the plot – and I shot any number

of scenes to prove it – when the final version

of the film emerged, I seemed to have

disappeared onto the cutting-room floor. But

then came an unexpected consolation. When

the studio tested a first cut of the film at

previews in the United States, they

discovered that the audiences there wanted

to see rather more of my character. So, four

months after shooting was finished, they

flew Gwyneth Paltrow and an entire set over

from the States, erected it at Pinewood in

England, and filmed the final scene in the

film as it was eventually released.

After that, it was with some relief that I

went back to work in the theatre, to play the

family patriarch and gentleman’s outfitter

Don Peppino Priore in the Italian Eduardo de

Filippo’s splendid comedy Saturday, Sunday,

Monday at the Chichester Festival Theatre in

Sussex, for a six-week season. My wife was

to be played by the Irish actress Dearbhla

Molloy. Entirely set in my character’s house

in Naples, and one of the great plays of the

Italian theatre in the twentieth century, it

was a joy after the darkness of both Oleanna

and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It put a

positive spring in my step throughout the

spring and early summer of 1998.

But then, over the horizon, came the

faintest sight of the little Belgian who had

not been a part of my life for the past three

years. Rumours started flying about that

London Weekend and ITV were thinking of

reviving Poirot for some two-hour specials, to

be filmed in 1999. In my heart, I had never

buried him, and now he might actually be

coming back.

Chapter 13

‘I HAD FORGOTTEN

HOW HARD HE WAS TO

FIND IN THE FIRST

PLACE’

Before Poirot could make his

reappearance in my life, however, the

theatre intervened once again. The producer

Kim Poster came to me with a proposal that

I appear as the Viennese composer Antonio

Salieri in a new production of Amadeus,

Peter Shaffer’s masterpiece about the life of

Mozart. It tells the story of Salieri’s jealousy

of Mozart’s extraordinary talent when he

arrives at the court of Emperor Joseph II of

Austria in 1781. Salieri tries everything in his

power to thwart the young man’s success,

and does so from a mixture of pride, envy

and greed.

Peter Hall had been the play’s first director

in 1979, when it had its world premiere at

the National Theatre in London, and then

transferred to the West End with Paul

Scofield as Salieri and Simon Callow as

Mozart. After transferring to Broadway, it

was then turned into a film in 1984 by the

Czech director Milos Forman, which not only

won him the Oscar for best film of the year,

but also won F. Murray Abraham the Oscar

for best actor for playing Salieri.

I did not hesitate. I accepted Kim’s offer,

not least because Peter Shaffer felt that

there was a great deal that could be added

to the play now. Before rehearsals began I

went to Peter to ask him how he wanted the

audience to feel about my character Salieri.

He felt that the audience should feel he was

cruel to Mozart but also feel sorry for him

that he could not control his jealousy

towards the young composer, no matter how

hard he tried. In the original version, Salieri

was a delicious part in a superb play about

the beauty of great music and the dark

passions that so often lie behind it, but

during our rehearsals Peter continued to

rewrite and added a sense of humour,

almost of pathos, to Salieri.

The fiercely Welsh young actor Michael

Sheen, then just twenty-nine, who would go

on to make an international reputation on

film and television playing the British Prime

Minister Tony Blair and interviewer Sir David

Frost, was to play Mozart opposite me. The

idea was that we would do a short tour of

the British Isles in September and early

October 1998, before bringing the play to

London. When Amadeus opened at the Old

Vic on Wednesday, 21 October 1998, the

national critics seemed impressed. Michael

Billington, in the Guardian, called it ‘highly

theatrical, superbly directed by Peter Hall’.

But some had their reservations about Peter

Shaffer’s rewrite. Charles Spencer, in the

Daily Telegraph, said, ‘This is a play that

takes a profound subject but has very little

profound to say about it: a second rate

drama, in fact, about what it feels like just to

be second rate,’ although he added that it

was a ‘cracking night out’.

Kim Poster wanted to build on our British

success by taking the play to Broadway

immediately, but by then, Brian Eastman had

come back to me with a firm plan to make

two two-hour Poirot films, and I had

committed to them. Kim kindly agreed that

s he would wait for me to finish the Poirot

filming, and would then take our Amadeus to

Broadway as soon possible afterwards.

After the run ended in London I went to

Spain to play Napoleon in a film, but once

that was over I was free to return to England

and Poirot, and so, almost five years to the

day after the joys of Dumb Witness, in the

early summer of 1999, I walked back onto

the set in my spats and homburg hat, to

appear in a new two-hour television version

of one of Dame Agatha’s most famous Poirot

stories, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The production team had changed a little.

The American Arts & Entertainment network

had come in to replace London Weekend as

the major production company putting up

the money and then selling the programmes

to ITV, but Brain Eastman was still there as

the producer, and Clive Exton was still

writing some of the screenplays. Hugh Fraser

and Pauline Moran were not there, because

neither Hastings nor Miss Lemon appeared in

the story, but Philip Jackson was there again

as the indefatigable Inspector Japp.

No matter how pleased I may have been

to return to playing Poirot, I had

nevertheless profoundly underestimated how

much I needed to remind myself about him

after five years away. I had forgotten how

hard he was to find in the first place – his

walk, his mannerisms, how he thinks, and so

on. In the first seven years that I played him,

he had gradually become more and more

like a comfortable glove that I could slip on

and off whenever I wanted to. But now, after

a five-year break, the glove had got a bit

stiff in the cupboard and did not slip on quite

so easily.

To make sure I recaptured him exactly as

he had been, I watched several hours from

the previous forty-five Poirot films we had

made before I set foot on the set of Roger

Ackroyd. I wanted to make absolutely sure

that the audience did not detect any

differences. And as I watched them, I was

reminded

of

his

vain,

pernickety,

idiosyncratic – and sometimes infuriating –

habits, as well as his natural charm and

kindness, particularly to servants and those

less capable of defending themselves.

The experience sharpened the feeling that

had been growing within me for some time,

that I really wanted to complete every single

one of the Poirot stories on film, all the way

until his final story, Curtain, in which he dies.

Wisely, Brian Eastman and Clive Exton had

decided to make the most of Poirot’s

absence from the screen for so long by

starting this first film after five years with

him growing marrows in the garden of his

small cottage in the English village of King’s

Abbott. He had not been at Whitehaven

Mansions for some considerable time, and

was, theoretically at least, in retirement. I

must say, I had one or two reservations

about the pretty silly gardening clothes I had

to wear in my first appearance on the screen

with the marrows. I was sure Poirot would

never have dressed that way, but I kept my

own counsel for once – it was only one

scene, after all.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a

wonderful story, and the one that firmly

established Dame Agatha as a best-selling

crime writer, while at the same time

ensuring that Poirot became one of the

leading fictional detectives of the time. She

wrote it in 1925, at the age of thirty-five,

and it was published in the spring of the

following year to considerable acclaim,

although some readers felt she had ‘not

quite played fair’ with them in her choice of

murderer in the plot. They felt it was a little

underhand, but Dame Agatha herself firmly

disagreed.

Roger Ackroyd became Dame Agatha’s –

and Poirot’s – first major success, selling

more than 5,000 copies in hardcover in

Britain alone in its first year. One reason for

this, I suspect, is that it assembles one of

the most ingenious group of suspects in all

h e r murder-mysteries, and even has the

murderer narrate the story, without giving

his or her identity away. It was an idea said

to have been given to Dame Agatha by Lord

Louis Mountbatten, although she also

credited her brother-in-law, James Watts,

with coming up with the same idea – of a

murderer describing the crime.