Poirot and Me (43 page)

Styles, the scene of their first encounter, and

now a country guest house, where he is

being looked after. Our screenwriter, Kevin

Elyot, who had written the excellent script

for Death on the Nile, carefully brought out

the poignancy of their reunion. But Hastings’

return also meant my final reunion with

Hugh Fraser, so long my most stalwart friend

throughout the early series, but who had

disappeared from the films in the years after

Brian Eastman had left. It was such a joy to

see him back again, and there was no one

that either Poirot or I would rather have

spent our dying moments beside.

When we finished filming, at the end of

November 2012, I made a brief speech to

the crew on the set at Pinewood, and then

retired to my trailer. To see someone you

have loved for so long disappear from your

life is one of the most difficult things for any

actor to cope with. The sense of grief and

loss almost overwhelmed me for a while, but

I was lucky enough to have Sheila beside me

on the set in the final moments of Poirot’s

life, and after we had quietly packed up my

things, Sean drove us home to our flat. A

part of my life had gone, even though,

ironically, I still had four films to finish.

It was not until the middle of January 2013

that I went back to Pinewood to film

Elephants Can Remember, the very last

Poirot novel that Dame Agatha wrote, which

was published in 1972, fifty-two years after

her first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It

held one great consolation for me – it

marked the return of Ariadne Oliver, and my

dear friend Zoë Wanamaker. She, and

Sheila, made the return to the ‘armadillo’

costume, the moustaches, the spats and the

waistcoats, bearable in the wake of his

death. It seemed strange to resurrect him,

but that is part of an actor’s life. You can find

yourself doing the oddest things.

But I did wonder to myself, as I walked

back onto the sound stage at Pinewood,

‘Where am I?’ The answer was simple: ‘Right

back where you started, and where you and

Dame Agatha have been for the past twenty-

five years.’

I also knew that this was the beginning of

the final act, the last stage of my journey

with Poirot. The cast which had assembled

around me made it easier to deal with the

knowledge that our voyage together was

coming to its end. Not only was Zoë back,

but there was also Iain Glen, whom I much

admired, Vincent Regan and a beautiful

young actress called Elsa Mollien. The script

by Nick Dear was excellent, and the whole

thing was beautifully shot – very much

keeping up the production standards the

series had always displayed.

The story was strong, with Poirot re-

examining the case of what may or may not

have been a murder, committed more than

twenty years earlier, after being asked to do

so by the daughter of the dead couple found

on a cliff-top overlooking the English

Channel. It was a good film, but nothing like

as challenging for me as Curtain.

By now, however, ITV had realised that

the worldwide interest in the thirteenth and

final Poirot series was growing at an

extraordinary pace, and so they decided to

respond

by

scheduling Elephants Can

Remember for its first transmission on

Sunday, 9 June 2013, barely three months

after we had finished shooting it. There was

no doubt that they were well aware – and I

have to say, so was I – just how much

interest there was around the world in the

final five films of the series, and, most of all,

in Curtain.

That became abundantly clear in early

April 2013, when, during a break in the

filming, Sheila and I were invited to the MIP

television festival in Cannes for a gala in

honour of the series. It turned out to be the

most extraordinary event we have ever

attended. There were 400 television buyers

from around the world, all of them –

apparently – huge fans of Poirot and the

series, and all there not only to honour the

sixty-five films that we had already made

and had been broadcast, but also to express

their enthusiasm for the final five, and

especially Curtain.

There was a tremendous promotional

video, and then a private dinner, which

ended with a set of speeches, including one

from me. I thanked everyone for their

kindness and support for the series, and did

my best to try and stay calm, which was not

exactly easy, because, as Sheila and I said

to each other as we left, the whole event

was almost overwhelming, with all those

industry professionals at the party and the

dinner standing and applauding something

that we had been making for twenty-five

years, and which had all begun with me

walking round and round my garden in

Acton, trying to capture Poirot’s mincing

strides.

It was almost an anti-climax to find myself

back at Pinewood again, to film the next in

the last series, The Big Four, published in

1927, the year after Dame Agatha’s

disappearance and the collapse of her

marriage to Archie Christie. She had hardly

written anything since those twin dramas in

her life, but she had also realised that she

needed to keep up the flow of novels to

satisfy her ever more enthusiastic readers. It

is said to have been Archie’s brother,

Campbell, who came up with the idea that

she did not need to write a new book until

she was ready to, and suggested that she

could adapt the twelve short stories that she

had written for the weekly magazine the

Sketch

in

the

months

before

her

disappearance. He thought, and she agreed,

that they could be reassembled into one long

story, and thereby transformed into a novel.

Dame Agatha was only too well aware that,

with Archie pressing for a divorce, and

without a recognisable source of income of

her own except from her writing, she needed

to ensure that she made a living.

Hardly surprisingly, the novel was not

among Dame Agatha’s finest. It felt like

something that had been cobbled together in

a rush, and the four central characters were

reminiscent of something her contemporary,

the English thriller writer Edgar Wallace,

might have come up with. After all, he had

published his own thriller series, The Four

Just Men, starting in 1905. That too had

grown out of newspaper serialisations,

although Wallace’s four main characters

were acting for good, while Dame Agatha’s

were certainly set upon evil.

The four were a shadowy Chinaman called

Li Chang Yen, a French femme fatale called

Madame

Olivier,

a

vulgar

American

multimillionaire called Abe Ryland, and a

mysterious Englishman known only as ‘The

Destroyer’. I cannot help thinking that

another part of Dame Agatha’s inspiration

came from the fictional Chinese villain Fu

Manchu, created by the Birmingham-born

novelist Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, always

known by his pen name of Sax Rohmer, in a

set of novels beginning in 1915.

In Dame Agatha’s original novel, Poirot’s

brother, Achille, made a brief appearance, to

help his only sibling, rather as Mycroft

Holmes would sometimes come to the

rescue of his brother Sherlock. Meanwhile,

the one woman Poirot truly admired, the

flamboyant

Russian

Countess

Vera

Rossakoff, also appeared in the original

story, but neither she nor Achille appeared in

Mark Gattis and Ian Hallard’s version for our

new film.

In fact, both screenwriters took a number

of liberties with her original story to make

the film work for a television audience in the

twenty-first century. But Dame Agatha’s

original novel did see the return of Hastings,

Miss Lemon and Chief Inspector Japp, and

they did indeed feature in our version. It was

a delight for us all to be back together again.

Almost as a foretaste of Curtain, our new

version of The Big Four opens with Poirot’s

funeral, as if to prepare the audience for the

fact that he would be taking his leave of

them at some point in the not too distant

future. Hastings, Miss Lemon and Japp are at

the graveside, and then assemble back at

Whitehaven

Mansions,

with

Poirot’s

manservant George, to pay tribute to the

man George calls ‘the best of masters’ and

Hastings calls ‘the best of men’ as they raise

their sherry glasses.

In fact, Poirot’s ‘death’ is simply a device in

the story, which then goes into flashback to

reveal the ambitions of the so-called ‘Big

Four’ to control the world, a desire that

Poirot thwarts in Dame Agatha’s original

novel. In our version, their desire is rather

more for ‘world peace’, in the face of the

prospect of an impending war in Europe, but

there is also a domestic element to our film.

In spite of his apparent death, Poirot is not

ready to leave the stage quite yet, and takes

some

pleasure

in

conducting

the

denouement, once again in a theatre, with

the principals assembled around him,

including Madame Olivier, played by my old

friend Patricia Hodge, who had appeared as

my wife in the BBC film about Robert

Maxwell.

Fo r The Labours of Hercules, which we

started filming in the middle of April 2013, it

was all but impossible to remain loyal to

Dame Agatha’s original collection of twelve

delightful short stories, published in 1947, in

which an old academic friend insists that

Poirot will never retire, even though he is

discussing his desire to give it all up and

grow marrows.

In the original stories, Poirot then asks

Miss Lemon to provide him with the

background to the Greek myth of Hercules’

twelve labours, which were imposed upon

him by the King of Tiryns. As a result of her

research, Poirot decides that he will

complete just twelve more cases himself and

then retire – although, of course, neither

Dame Agatha nor her publishers ever

allowed him to, no matter what she may

have said in her stories.

When the collection was first published,

Dame Agatha’s fellow crime novelist Margery

Allingham described it as every bit ‘as

satisfactory as its title’, adding that she

‘often thought that Mrs Christie was not so

much the best as the only living writer of the

true or classic detective story’.

The twelve ‘labours’ Poirot chooses in

Dame Agatha’s original are so diverse that

Guy Andrews, who was writing the new

screenplay and who had adapted so many of

her stories for the television series over the

years, decided to create an almost entirely

new story, though using some of her

characters. He based his new version around

a jewel thief and murderer called Marrascaud

– ‘the most vicious maniac in the history of

crime’ – who kills a young woman whom

Poirot has promised to protect, before

fleeing to a hotel in the Swiss Alps, only to

be trapped there in a snowstorm. To add to

the mystery and stay close to the title, the

whole affair pivots around the theft of a

series of paintings known as ‘The Labours of

Hercules’, by an entirely fictional Dutch

painter named Hugo van Druys.

Guy’s new version is enlivened by the

return of the Countess Rossakoff, who had

captured a portion of Poirot’s heart before

abandoning him to continue her career as a

jewel thief in the United States, at the end of

Dame Agatha’s story The Double Clue. In

fact, the Countess appears in the last of the