Poirot and Me (30 page)

The story also allows Poirot to reveal his

dislike of the countryside, in spite of his

retiring there from London. ‘There are more

jealousies and rivalries than Ancient Rome,’

Clive Exton has him say at one point in the

film, describing country life, before adding, ‘I

thought I could escape the wickedness of the

city.’ Japp is only too pleased to see him,

however, confiding solemnly, with his hang-

dog expression and sad eyes, ‘Bit like old

times eh?’

One of the things that has always

fascinated me about Dame Agatha’s original

story is that one of the characters, the

busybody Caroline, is said to have been the

inspiration for her other principal detective,

Miss Marple, who would appear in 1930 in

her very first mystery, Murder at the

Vicarage.

Directed by Andrew Grieve, I had the

highest hopes for our new Roger Ackroyd –

the story was terrific, the location was

excellent, the sets were good, the cast

strong. And yet, somehow, after we had

finished, I felt it lacked something. I am not

sure exactly why; perhaps it had something

to do with my expectations being too high.

The

denouement

was

exciting

and

unexpected

–

it

should

have

been

marvellous, but somehow, there was

something missing.

Interestingly, there had been several other

attempts to make The Murder of Roger

Ackroyd work – on film and on stage – and

they too had struggled a little, somehow

never quite matching the supreme moments

of Dame Agatha’s novel itself.

A stage version, adapted from the novel

by Michael Morton and called Alibi, was

produced on the West End stage in May 1928

by the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier and

starred Charles Laughton as Poirot. It was a

decent, but not overwhelming, success and

was

certainly

nothing

to

rival

the

phenomenal success of Dame Agatha’s The

Mousetrap a quarter of a century later. A film

version, also called Alibi, appeared in 1931,

with Austin Trevor as Poirot, but it too failed

to set the box office alight, and when

Laughton took the London stage production

to New York in 1932, once again playing

Poirot, it closed after just twenty-four

performances.

Publication

of The Murder of Roger

Ackroyd coincided with a painful period of

Agatha Christie’s life, as her marriage to

Colonel Archie Christie was coming to an

end. They eventually divorced in 1928, and

within two years, she had found real

happiness in her second marriage, to the

archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was

fourteen years younger than she. In the

wake of her divorce, she had decided to take

a holiday by herself in the autumn of 1929,

with a journey on the Orient Express train

from Calais to Istanbul. From there, she had

then gone on to visit an archaeological dig

not far from Baghdad. She eventually went

home, but the following March, she made

the journey to the site again, this time

mainly by sea, where she met Mallowan,

who had been away with appendicitis on her

first visit. The couple travelled back to

England together on the Orient Express and,

shortly afterwards, he proposed to her.

I find it very romantic that Max Mallowan

and Agatha Christie married on 11

September 1930, in a small church in

Edinburgh, and then took off on the Orient

Express once again for their honeymoon.

Her new husband’s occupation was to form

part of the central inspiration for her work in

the years to come. Within a year, they were

back on an archaeological dig, once again

not far from Baghdad, at a place called

Nineveh. It was there, in the autumn of

1931, that she began writing the Poirot story

Lord Edgware Dies, which was published in

the spring of 1933 in Britain and shortly

afterwards in the United States, where it was

called Thirteen at Dinner. The story was

dedicated to one of Max Mallowan’s

archaeologist colleagues at Nineveh and his

wife.

It was this story that was the second of

the two-hour films that Brian Eastman and I

went on to make in the summer of 1999, and

it was a very strange experience. As you

may remember, I had appeared in a film

version of it before, a made-for-television

movie in 1985, which starred Peter Ustinov

as Poirot. I had played Inspector Japp, in one

of the worst performances I think I have ever

given in my life, although Peter kindly

suggested to me that I might make a good

Poirot myself. Peter was such a nice,

entertaining man; I remember him with

enormous affection.

When we started filming Lord Edgware

Dies at Twickenham, memories of playing

Japp came flooding back, even though our

two films were quite different. Another old

Poirot hand, Anthony Horowitz, had written a

script that continued the theme of Poirot’s

return from retirement that Clive Exton had

set up in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

There was even a celebratory supper for him

at Whitehaven Mansions, attended by Japp,

Hastings and Miss Lemon – after Hastings’

sudden return from the Argentine, leaving

his new wife there alone. As Anthony has

Japp say at the reunion, with just a hint of

irony, ‘Here we are, the four of us together

again. There is only one thing missing – the

body.’ It takes almost no time for one to

appear: Lord Edgware’s.

Part of Dame Agatha’s inspiration for the

story came from seeing an American

entertainer called Ruth Draper in London in

the 1920s. ‘I thought how clever she was

and how good her impersonations were,’ she

wrote in her autobiography, and our

television version of the story unfolds around

Miss Lemon persuading Poirot and Hastings

to go and see a similar act. But when it

came to the denouement of the story, and

Poirot’s revelation of the murderer, I found it

very difficult indeed not to think of how Peter

Ustinov had done it in our American film

together. He had made it very funny, and I

could not quite get that out of my mind,

even though I was determined to stick to my

own version of the little man, which I

eventually managed to do. What made the

difference finally, and allowed me to keep

the memory of Peter at bay, was that as the

years had passed, I had grown steadily more

confident in playing Poirot, and now

rediscovering him gave me the courage to

play him with a little more gravitas. Unlike

Peter’s version, my Poirot was a man to be

taken seriously, no matter how idiosyncratic

he may have appeared.

No sooner had I finished filming than I was

back in Peter Hall’s hands for the American

production of Amadeus, once again opposite

Michael Sheen as Mozart. We were due to

open at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los

Angeles on 5 October 1999 and then at the

Music Box Theatre on Broadway on 16

December. It meant that I would be

spending the end of the Millennium away

from home, but the play was so special, it

made up for it.

The Los Angeles opening went well,

though Variety wondered whether the film

version had rather sated the appetite for it

among

theatregoers

in

California,

concluding, ‘Shaffer’s stage play seems, well,

superfluous.’ Not everyone agreed. The

Hollywood Reporter suggested Peter Shaffer

had made a ‘very good play . . . even better’

and kindly described my performance as

‘thrilling’, although the Los Angeles Times

also wondered whether there was really an

appetite for Amadeus again in the wake of

the Oscar-winning film.

In New York, the reviews were equally

mixed. Some wondered whether the play no

longer really held up in the wake of the film.

Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, was

unimpressed by my Salieri, preferring

Michael Sheen’s Mozart, but many others

seemed to like us both, with Newsday calling

it ‘extravagantly enjoyable, even more

satisfying than the original’. The legendary

New York critic Clive Barnes described it as

‘a thoughtful yet immensely enjoyable play’.

The audiences seemed to agree, and I

was nominated for a Critics’ Circle Award in

Los Angeles, as well as an Outer Critics’

Circle Award in New York and a ‘Tony’

nomination. Every bit as thrilling, however,

was the fact that I also received a

handwritten letter from Milos Forman – the

Czech director who had turned Amadeus into

an eight-Oscar, four-BAFTA and four-Golden

Globe-winning masterpiece of the cinema –

congratulating me on my performance.

At the end of May 2000, I packed my bags

for London to become Poirot once again, but

before I went anywhere near a television

studio, Sheila and I were whisked off to

Japan as guests of the country’s biggest

broadcaster, NHK, with its one hundred

million viewers. Agatha Christie’s Poirot was

one of their most successful series and

Sheila and I found ourselves treated like

visiting diplomats when we arrived in Tokyo.

There were limousines everywhere and a

great many red carpets.

Even out of costume, everyone in Japan

seemed to know who I was, and I was

interviewed on all the main news bulletins. It

was then that I started to explain in public

that one of my great ambitions was to film

every one of Dame Agatha’s Poirot stories, in

a body of work that would be unique for

television. I told several of the Japanese

interviewers that Poirot’s life had a definite

beginning, middle and end, which I very

much wanted to portray on the screen. I

wanted to bring Dame Agatha’s canon of

work about him to a close with Poirot’s last

case, Curtain.

The trip to Japan brought home to me that

Agatha Christie’s Poirot had become one of

Britain biggest television exports, overtaking

even previous record-holders like Inspector

Morse. Some experts claimed that more than

one billion viewers had watched the series

around the world, in countries as diverse as

Estonia, Lithuania, Korea, Egypt, Brazil,

Angola, Iceland, Mauritius, Iran, Singapore,

China, and, of course, Japan; though I should

say at once that I do not believe that Sheila

and I had quite realised that until we were

ushered regally around Japan that summer.

It was something of a shock to come back

to reality in England, and then be shipped off

to Tunisia in the heat of summer to make

the first of a second set of two two-hour

specials for the Arts & Entertainments

network, this time Dame Agatha’s Murder in

Mesopotamia. The original novel was

published in 1936, and was partly written

while she was there with her new husband.

Given her second marriage to Max Mallowan,

it was hardly surprising that Dame Agatha

had begun to set some of her stories around

archaeological digs in the desert of the

Middle East, in what was to become Iraq and

Syria. Her novel was dedicated to ‘my many

archaeological friends’.

Directed by the Lancashire-born director

Tom Clegg, who was in his sixties and had

never worked on Agatha Christie’s Poirot

before, but was a veteran of the British

television series Sharpe, it was written by

Clive Exton, and once again he made one or

two changes to Dame Agatha’s original

story. In particular, he made Hastings a part

of the mystery, even though he never

appeared in the original novel, and he also

made Poirot rather less enamoured of the

desert than he had been in the book itself,