Poirot and Me (12 page)

series

after Blott

on

the

Landscape. In my heart, I still thought of

myself as a rather serious classical actor.

Could I mix the two? Could I be both Poirot

and Iago?

On Monday morning I realised that I could,

or at least the critics thought I could. They

loved the show, and so, apparently, did the

audience. London Weekend rang to tell me

that more than eight million people had

watched it the night before, a huge

proportion of the television audience in the

country.

As I looked at some of the reviews in the

papers, I said to Sheila, ‘I cannot believe

what I’m reading. It is quite extraordinary.’ I

think she was as surprised as I was.

In the Daily Express, for example, Antonia

Swinson called my portrayal of Poirot

‘definitive’, and added that I’d ‘stepped

nimbly into the role, with a beautiful set of

moustaches, and every tiny detail of his

appearance and personality perfect. Poirot

now lives.’

Jaci Stephen, in that afternoon’s London

Evening Standard, called me ‘brilliant’ and

added, ‘More than any of his predecessors,

he brought to the Belgian detective’s

character an entertaining mix of humour,

inquisitiveness and pedantry.’

My mind went back to the previous

summer on the Isles of Scilly, when Geoffrey

had told me that Poirot would change my

life. Although I still did not quite realise how

much, that Monday morning in January 1989

showed beyond doubt that it had. Nothing

was ever to be quite the same again.

To prove it, on the Tuesday morning, I

was scheduled to have breakfast at the Ritz

Hotel in London with a man from the Daily

Telegraph

called

Hugh

Montgomery-

Massingberd. Hugh could clearly see that I

was in a state of shock. His interview with

me appeared the following morning, and

neatly captured the new world that I

suddenly found myself inhabiting.

‘With the fame that only the telly can

bestow,’ Hugh wrote, ‘David Suchet, alias

Hercule Poirot, woke up yesterday morning

to find himself a household name.’

Though we had never met before, Hugh and

I got on terribly well at that breakfast – even

though we only had fruit and muesli, as we

were both on a diet – and he kindly

concluded by describing me as ‘most

sympathetic and unactorish’ as well as a

‘sensitive and unshowy artist’ who was

‘surely a major star of the future’.

I was stunned when I read that the

following morning.

The good reviews kept on coming. The

following Sunday, Alan Coren in the Mail on

Sunday suggested that ‘by homing in

unerringly on the most telegenic of Poirot’s

quirks’, I had succeeded in making the

character entirely my own.

As the reviews flowed, so did the fan

letters. Suddenly people I did not know were

writing to me as though I were a long-lost

friend, and that started a train of thought in

my mind that has remained with me ever

since – what was it that people liked about

Poirot?

I am convinced that the reaction to my

work in that first series was more to do with

Poirot than me. The reason the reviews were

so flattering was because it was Dame

Agatha’s Poirot that mattered to them, not

me. It was she and her creation that won

their hearts and minds.

The fact that he had a kind heart was her

work, not mine. The fact that he was always

polite and respectful towards women was

her doing, not mine, as was his charm and

gentleness towards servants and waiters. His

tendency to choose the wrong words – and

allow himself to be corrected by Hastings –

was her idea, not mine, as was his acute

awareness of his fellow characters’ sadness

from time to time.

What I was doing was communicating

Poirot’s character to the world, and that was

my job – to serve my original creator and my

script writer.

In those first days after the series had

begun on ITV, I realised for the first time

that Poirot touches people’s hearts in a way

that I had never anticipated when I started

to play him. I cannot put my finger on

precisely how he does it, but somehow he

makes those who watch him feel secure.

People see him and feel better. I don’t know

exactly why that is, but there is something

about him. My performance had touched that

nerve.

That showed only too clearly in the

audience’s reaction. My mail bag of fan

letters exploded overnight. Within a few

weeks of the series starting in 1989, I was

getting a hundred letters a week. Many of

them were deeply touching.

It was like being hit over the head with a

mallet. I did not know what had happened.

The show’s success was a joy, but I still

was not sure whether there would ever be

another series, and I was an actor with a

family to support. The reviews and fan

letters were wonderful, but I had to work.

In fact, I had agreed to do two pieces for

television: a screen version of Tom

Kempinski’s Separation, the play I had done

at Hampstead and at the Comedy Theatre

not all that long before Poirot started, and a

new production of Edward Bond’s Bingo, in

which I was to play William Shakespeare. I

was to portray him as a manic-depressive

genius who had retired to Stratford-upon-

Avon as a rich and disillusioned man.

Both parts could hardly have been further

from Poirot, but they proved to me that my

peers in the profession saw me as a

character actor who could transform himself.

I hoped the British public did too.

Mind you, my new found ‘fame’ took me to

some strange places. Not long after the first

series started, Sheila and I found ourselves

featured in Hello! magazine, hardly a place

that we thought that we would ever appear.

We were photographed in our new house in

Pinner, rather as though we were some sort

of minor foreign royalty, which was a

decidedly surreal experience, not least

because the magazine suggested I was in ‘a

heady haze of euphoria’ over my ‘worldwide

success’.

Nothing could have been further from the

truth. It would have been more accurate to

say that, far from being euphoric, Sheila and

I were desperately worried about whether

we would be able to stay in our house.

London Weekend, as a part of the ITV

network, had an option for Brian Eastman to

produce and me to play a second series of

ten Poirot films, but they had not exercised

their options yet, which meant our financial

position was still not exactly secure.

Would there ever be any more work?

Could we pay the mortgage and the bills? I

should confess that in the nineteen years

before my first series as Poirot, I had never

earned very much. I may have been a

character actor with what I think was a good

reputation, but I certainly was not a rich one.

It was not until late in February 1989 that

ITV confirmed that they actually wanted to

do a second series – on an almost identical

schedule to the first. They were anxious for

me to film another ten stories between early

July and Christmas 1989, which they would

broadcast between January and March 1990.

This time, Nick Elliott at London Weekend,

who had been the executive producer on the

first series with his colleague Linda Agran,

wanted Brian Eastman to deliver an opening

two-hour film, to be broadcast in early

January 1990, based on Dame Agatha’s

magnificent Cornish mystery Peril at End

House, and then a one-hour story for the

each of the following eight Sundays. My

Poirot was to become the cornerstone of

ITV’s Sunday nights.

It wasn’t the critics that had convinced

London Weekend to commission another

series – though they were as thrilled by their

reviews as I was. It was down to the fact

that the viewing figures for each Sunday

evening had stayed in their millions, and had

even edged up from time to time. The series

had also begun to sell around the world. As

well as Canada and the United States, it

looked as though other countries, particularly

in Europe, were interested. Belgium had

already started transmitting the films.

As a result of that worldwide audience, in

addition to Peril at End House and the eight

stories, London Weekend wanted Brian to

produce a full-length special at the end of

the second series: the very first Poirot story,

The Mysterious Affair at Styles – the first

book that Dame Agatha ever published. It

was to be broadcast later in 1990, to

celebrate the centenary of her birth.

The decision to commission a second

series was a great compliment, as it would

firmly establish my Poirot in the public

consciousness, but it was also a great relief.

It meant we would be able to stay in our

house – at least for another year. Elmdene,

as it was called, was becoming the house

that Poirot built.

Just as importantly, however, the second

series meant that I was going to become

‘that little man’ again, which made me truly

happy. No matter what my fears might have

been as an actor, I certainly wasn’t ready to

say goodbye to Hercule Poirot. I’d come to

care about him far, far too much for that.

Chapter 6

‘I WANTED HIM TO

BECOME EVEN MORE

HUMAN’

It was another hot summer’s day, this

time in late June 1989, when I became

Hercule Poirot for the second time, and

climbed back into my padding and his

immaculate

clothes

to

resume

my

relationship with the little man who had

swept into my life, knocked me off my feet

and come to mean so much to me.

And, once again, I would be revealing his

foibles alongside my own, and sharing his

obsessions with mine. For I was sure that

this time the closeness between us would be

revealed even more than it had been just a

few months earlier, during the first series.

The first of the second series was to be

the two-hour special, Peril at End House,

shot partly on location, which opened with

Poirot on an aeroplane on his way to a

holiday in the west of England – and plainly

not enjoying it at all. In fact, Poirot is feeling

very uncomfortable indeed, because he does

not like flying and makes no secret of the

fact, while Hastings is sitting beside him

looking serene and untroubled. In the

character notes I had written about Poirot

before the first series, I had at number six:

‘Hates to fly. Makes him feel sick,’ and so the

scene was a perfect cameo of one of his little

idiosyncrasies.

Dame Agatha wrote the full-length novel

on which the film was based in 1932, and

many of her admirers regard it as one of her

finest murder-mysteries, even though in her

own autobiography, published more than

forty years later, she confessed that it had

made so little impression on her that she

could not even remember having written it.

That led some commentators to mistakenly

undervalue what is, to me, one of her most

ingenious stories.

Poirot and Hastings are taking a holiday at

‘the Queen of Watering Places’ on the south-

west coast of England, the fictional St Loo in

Cornwall, where they are staying at the

Majestic Hotel, which reminds Hastings of

the French Riviera. A good proportion of the

film was actually shot on location in

Salcombe in Devon, rather than the studio,

but the interesting thing for me was that

Dame Agatha almost certainly used her own

experience of the Imperial Hotel in Torquay,

her birthplace, as part of its inspiration.