Authors: David Suchet,Geoffrey Wansell
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
Death on the Nile every bit as glamorous a
scheduling, screening it on Easter Monday,
12 April 2004, again at nine in the evening.
T h e Daily Mail called it ‘Murder most
pleasing’, with Peter Paterson praising its
‘excellent cast’ and concluding that he
thoroughly enjoyed ‘this skittish production
which half-guyed the Christie formula while
remaining faithful to it’.
By
coincidence,
another
British
broadcaster, Channel 4, had screened the
Ustinov version on the Saturday evening
before ours went out on the Monday, and
this caught the eye of some of the reviewers.
Charlie Catchpole, in the Daily Express,
pointed out the contrast, saying that while
Channel 4 had ‘wheeled out the 1978 film of
Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit for what
seemed like the one hundredth time’, ours –
by comparison – was a ‘sumptuous treat,
which made the movie look stagey and
laborious’.
To underline the three main production
companies’ confidence in Death on the Nile,
they had arranged a special screening of the
film at the Marché International des Films et
des Programmes Pour la Télévision festival
(always known as MIP in the trade) in
Cannes the month after its British broadcast
at Easter. The aim was to introduce the new-
style Poirot to television buyers around the
world, and there were very good reasons to
do so.
By then, the Poirot series had sold to
eighty-three countries around the world, and
had been one of the bestselling British
programmes internationally for nearly a
decade. Granada International, which was
responsible for selling the film to other
countries,
seized
the
opportunity
to
demonstrate to 4,000 television buyers
exactly how what was now known as Agatha
Christie: Poirot had improved, and become a
television event in the process. I was only
too happy to go along to support them in
doing so.
The Hollow, the final film of the new series
of four, was given just as good a send-off by
ITV, being broadcast on Bank Holiday
Monday, 30 August 2004, at nine in the
evening. Yet, in spite of the excellent cast,
the reviews were less overwhelming. The
Times commented rather sadly, ‘Poirot is
becoming like a game of charades after
dinner – you’re either in the mood or you
just can’t be bothered to play along,’ while
James Watson, in the Daily Telegraph,
added, ‘Unfortunately, for all the fun along
the way, nobody involved could disguise the
obvious flaw: that, as Christie plots go,
yesterday’s was rather routine.’
That was not the view of the film’s actors,
however. After the filming, both Sarah Miles
and Edward Fox wrote to me to say how
much they had enjoyed making The Hollow.
I was very touched, just as I was proud of
the film.
But the critics’ muted reaction did nothing
to stem the enthusiasm for the programmes
around the world, as the new series sold
even
more
successfully
than
its
predecessors. Suddenly everyone involved
with Poirot seemed rejuvenated, and ITV
rapidly decided to make another four films,
which we shot during 2005.
The success of the first of the new-style
series had reinvigorated me too. It now
seemed possible, if not entirely certain, that
I might actually be able to play in all of
Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories, as I had
wanted for so long. I told one interviewer at
the time that I would like to do it before I
reached the age of sixty-five, which would be
in 2011. I did not know then that it would
take a couple more years before I would
finally make my dream come true.
The first of the second series of Poirot
under the new production team was The
Mystery of the Blue Train, another of Dame
Agatha’s great set-piece mysteries, although
she herself did not care for it, calling it
‘easily the worst book I ever wrote’, in a
newspaper interview in 1966, and adding, ‘I
hate it.’ She was being far too hard on
herself and her story.
There can be no denying, however, that
Dame Agatha wrote it during one of the
least happy periods of her life, when she was
on holiday with her daughter Rosalind in
February 1927 on the Canary Islands – and
that may well have coloured her opinion of
her story. She was writing it in the wake of
her separation from Archie and her eleven-
day disappearance. Heartache must have
taken its toll on her attitude. What is certain
is that she did not enjoy writing it for one
moment, and only did so because she had an
obligation to her publisher.
But it marked a turning point in her career.
As she was to explain many years later in
her autobiography, ‘That was the moment
when I changed from an amateur to a
professional. I assumed the burden of a
profession, which is to write even when you
don’t want to, don’t much like what you are
writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.’
In fact, the book was to sell 7,000 copies in
hardback in its first edition in Britain, doing
just as well as her previous book had done.
It was published in March 1928 in Britain,
and later that same year in the United
States.
The following month, Dame Agatha was
granted a divorce, and almost immediately
afterwards Archie married long-term mistress
Nancy Neele. The two were to remain
married until 1958, when Nancy died of
cancer, and Archie himself died just four
years later. In the wake of her divorce,
Dame Agatha wanted to stop using her
husband’s name for her books, but her
publishers in both Britain and the United
States were firmly against any change, as
she was already so well established. As a
result, she remained Agatha Christie to her
readers for the rest of her life.
For our new version of The Mystery of the
Blue Train, Guy Andrews, the screenwriter,
took a number of liberties with the details of
Dame Agatha’s original story, not least in
adding characters that were never there in
the first place, to expand the story, and
moving it from the 1920s to the 1930s.
Hettie Macdonald, who was new to the
series, took charge of the project, to bring it
a sharper, more contemporary feel.
Once again, there was to be no Hastings,
Japp or Miss Lemon, but the producers gave
me a spectacular cast, including Lindsay
Duncan, Roger Lloyd-Pack and Nicholas
Farrell from Britain, as well as a real movie
star, Elliott Gould, from the United States. I
was thrilled to have Elliott with us, and I
discovered later that he had been dying to
be in a Poirot and was delighted to be asked.
The cast was so good that I had to pinch
myself. Here I was, appearing with an iconic
movie star, a man who was a cult in
Hollywood, in a Poirot. What’s more, he
seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.
We filmed in Menton in the south of
France, which stood in for Nice, the train’s
destination, as well as on a set at
Shepperton in England, which was built to
the precise dimensions of the train itself, so
that we could feel the claustrophobia of the
carriages and the corridors. But for the
exteriors of the train, we spent some time in
Peterborough in England, which had some of
the original carriages from the Blue Train
itself, though it didn’t have quite the climate
of the Côte d’Azur.
In spite of Dame Agatha’s dislike for the
story, our version certainly remains one of
my favourites. It is a little dark, but it
nevertheless
contains
some
wonderful
performances, not just by Elliott Gould, but
also by Lindsay Duncan and British actor
Trevor Eve’s talented daughter Alice. There
was also a haunting musical score by
Stephen McKeon to add to the atmosphere.
It is one of the films I look back on today
with real pleasure.
The second in the new series that we
filmed in 2005 was After the Funeral, which
had been published in the British Coronation
year of 1953, and the following year in the
United States – where it was called Funerals
Are Fatal. It is another of Dame Agatha’s
portraits of a dysfunctional family, where
everyone seems to be at each other’s
throats.
Indeed,
in
this
story,
the
relationships between the family members
are so complicated that Dame Agatha
thought it wise to include a complete family
tree in her book, to help the reader sort out
exactly who was who.
Once again, Poirot is acting alone, called
in to investigate a change to the will of the
wealthy Richard Abernethie, whose surviving
sister remarks to her relatives at the official
reading of the will, ‘But he was murdered,
wasn’t he?’ Until then, it had been assumed
by everyone that he had died of natural
causes. The family solicitor calls Poirot.
And, once again, the cast was wonderful.
Geraldine James, who had played my
character’s wife in Blott on the Landscape
and had also done the ITV thriller Seesaw
with me, Anna Calder-Marshall, Anthony
Valentine, and – perhaps the most exciting
of all – a young Michael Fassbender, who
was to go on to have a tremendous career in
Hollywood as one of the new generation of
dashing leading men, in films like Inglourious
Basterds and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
Michael had also appeared with me in the
BBC crime drama NCS.
Once again, there were a number of
substantial changes from Dame Agatha’s
original story, and our new screenwriter,
Philomena McDonagh, also took some
trouble to delve even deeper into Poirot’s
psyche, giving me a line of dialogue which
reveals his intense sense of loneliness, which
we had gradually been revealing in the last
series. She has Poirot say, ‘The journey of
life, it can be hard for those who travel
alone.’
Mind you, in the original book, Dame
Agatha also reveals a little more of Poirot’s
complex character when she has him say,
‘Women are never kind, though they can
sometimes be tender.’ That is not the
remark of a misogynist, but rather the view
of a man who does not experience sexual
attraction. Poirot, for me, was never in the
least interested in sex, although he could
recognise the symptoms of desire in others.
He was sceptical about romance, with the
exception, perhaps, of Countess Rossakoff
and
Virginie
Mesnard,
and
a
touch
sentimental when it came to motherly
affection, but from the waist down, he did
not really exist. His life remained firmly
based on his logic and his ‘little grey cells’,
which brought him his unique powers of
deduction and his acute perception of
character in other people.
That is part of Dame Agatha’s genius. She
writes wonderful characters, and it is they
who sustain the readers’ or viewers’ interest
as the plot develops. She has total
understanding for the minds of the people
she writes about, and she endows Poirot
with her understanding, and then allows him
to demonstrate it – particularly in the
denouements to her stories.
You see, I think, and it is only my view,
that she started her stories from the end and
worked backwards towards the beginning as
she developed them. She thought of a plot,
and who might have committed the crime,
but then travelled back with the idea, which
she worked into a story, peopling every