Poirot and Me (40 page)

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