Poirot and Me Read online

  All around me the crew are trying their best to help me. I realise that I am so lucky to have them too, and vow to tell them so when we finally wrap the filming the following Monday afternoon – after we’ve had the weekend to recover.

  Sheila walks me back to the set, and I take my position. I am the only actor in this next scene, and the two cameras are set up to take different angles of these last moments of my life as Poirot.

  The challenge is to make the scene moving but not too melodramatic. But at the same time I want to convince every single member of the audience, wherever they may be around the world, that dying is not easy, or comfortable. I do not want to sugar-coat the end of Poirot.

  Once again, the bell rings to announce the start of the scene. Once again, I explain that I will lift my finger to announce when I’m ready to start. Then, and only then, will Hettie call for action.

  Finally I’m ready, and she does. I do not want to have to do this scene more than once. So I concentrate every fibre of my being on getting it exactly right. I am there to serve the Hercule Poirot that Dame Agatha Christie created, and nowhere can that be more important than in his last words.

  Thankfully, it seems to work. Hettie calls, ‘Cut,’ and the great bell rings to mark the end of this one and only take.

  Now there is just one scene left on this damp, grey Friday in November – the discovery of Poirot’s body by Hastings. And, once again, I am determined that it should not be sugary. I discuss it with Hettie, and with Sheila, asking them what they think – but in my heart I know that I do not want his death to seem too chocolate-box.

  It is a little after six in the evening now, and the crew are beginning to tire, as am I. This is the twenty-second day of shooting, with only one day off on some weekends, and the emotion of the day has made it all the more draining. I can see it in the faces of the people around me.

  No matter how tired I am, one thing I am sure of: I want Sheila to join Hettie and me on the set, to see what they both feel about how Poirot should be found after his death. I want to make him look as though he has been struggling with the fear that there might be no redemption. Passing is not always as easy as it is portrayed on film.

  It has to be real. For me, that is what every actor should aim to bring to any part he plays. You remain true to your character, no matter what happens. I do not want my Poirot to have a neat, sanitised death, filmed through soft gauze to give it a romantic haze. I want him to die as I hope I have helped him to live: as a real, extraordinary human being.

  Hettie keeps the filming as brief as she possibly can, just getting Hugh’s reaction in close-up as well as when he bursts into the room. Not a single person on that small set, including Hugh, Sheila and I, want it to go on for one moment longer than it absolutely has to. It has been a brutal day and we want it to end.

  It does. Hettie calls, ‘Cut,’ the great bell rings and we have finished for the day.

  As I walk back to my trailer, parked outside the sound stage, I feel completely lost. Sheila and I are going home for the weekend, but I do not know what to do with myself. I cannot sit or stand still, and so I pace about the trailer. When we finally get home, I still cannot settle. I am not sure if I want to eat or not; not sure whether to go out and see friends, or just stay at home.

  In the end we stay at home together. But the hardest part is that we have to go back to Pinewood on Monday morning for the twenty-third and last day of filming, even though Poirot is already dead. The future hangs over us both like a dark cloud throughout the weekend, no matter how hard we try to put it out of our minds.

  Another bleak, drizzly day dawns on Monday and I have to film the final moments of the story, which are vital because Poirot tells Hastings – in a letter delivered four months after his death – the solution to the mystery of the killings that surrounded them both in these last days at Styles.

  I cannot allow myself to step back from the role, but, quite suddenly, sitting there at the writing desk in my stage bedroom, I recapture a little of the joy that has always been a part of Poirot and me.

  I am writing a letter to Hastings to explain all that has happened, and what makes it all the extraordinary is that the art department have discovered a way to create my handwriting so that I do not have to write every word myself time after time. It is as though a ghost has taken over my life.

  At the end of the scene Poirot gives one last look to the camera. I want to put across the twinkle in my eye that I have used so often when I have inhabited that little man. There has been enough gloom in this final story.

  As I look across at the camera for the final time, I think back to Poirot’s last words to Hastings on Friday.

  ‘Cher ami,’ I said softly, as he was leaving Poirot to rest.

  That phrase meant an enormous amount to me, which is why I repeated it after he had shut the door behind him. But my second ‘cher ami’ in that scene was for someone other than Hastings. It was for my dear, dear friend Poirot. I was saying goodbye to him as well, and I felt it with all my heart.

  Chapter 1

  ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole’

  When Hercule Poirot died on that late November afternoon in 2012, a part of me died with him.

  Agatha Christie’s fastidious little Belgian detective had been part of my life for almost a quarter of a century. I’d played him in more than a hundred hours of television over twenty-five years. And now here I was portraying his death.

  Words really can’t express how much that obsessive, kindly, gentle man with his mincing walk, his ‘little grey cells’ and his extraordinary accent had come to mean to me. To lose him now, after so long, was like losing the dearest of friends, even though I was only an actor playing a part.

  But I knew, in my heart, that I had done him justice. I had brought him to life for millions of people around the world, and helped them to care about him as much as I did. That was my consolation as I breathed my last for him in the television studio that day, because I knew that I would never play him again: there were no more of his original stories to bring to the screen.

  Hercule Poirot’s death was the end of a long creative journey for me, made all the more emotional as I had only ever wanted to play Dame Agatha’s true Poirot, the man she’d first created in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 and whose death she chronicled more than half a century later, in Curtain in 1975.

  He was as real to me as he had been to her: a great detective, a remarkable man, if, perhaps, just now and then, a little irritating. He had inhabited my life every bit as much as he must have done hers as she wrote thirty-three novels, more than fifty short stories and a play about him, making Poirot one of the most famous fictional detectives in the world, alongside Sherlock Holmes.

  But how had it come to this? How had I come to inhabit his morning jacket and pin-striped trousers, his black patent leather shoes and his elegantly brushed grey Homburg hat for so many years? What had brought us together? Was there something in me that found a particular echo in this short, tubby man in his sixties, given to pince-nez and saying ‘chut’ instead of ‘ssh’?

  Looking back now, these many years later, I suspect in my heart that there was.

  To understand precisely what I mean we have to travel back in time – to an autumn evening in 1987 in an Indian restaurant in, of all places, Acton in west London – when I was first asked to play the role. But that also means that I must tell you something about me, as an actor, and how Poirot came to haunt my every step. For he and I are now inextricably linked, as I hope you will see.

  Let’s start at the beginning. Why on earth would anyone ask me to play the role? After all, I wasn’t exactly the obvious choice. I’d spent almost twenty years playing pretty menacing parts, rather than charming detectives. I’d played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Iago to Ben Kingsley’s Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I’d played Sigmund Freud in a six-hour drama documentary for BBC television, and won a radio drama award for a dramatisation
of Tolstoy’s horrifying portrayal of doomed love, The Kreutzer Sonata.

  Yet, ironically, it was another dark role, my portrayal of Blott, the eccentric, malevolent gardener in Tom Sharpe’s marvellous comic novel Blott on the Landscape – dramatised for the BBC in 1985 – that led to that Indian restaurant in Acton. It was my portrayal of that strange, haunted man intent on using every means at his disposal to save his aristocratic mistress and her country house from the developers that led to my becoming Poirot, the little man who was so much a part of the rest of my life.

  I was forty-one years old when Poirot first appeared beside me. I’d been bitten by the acting bug when I was a member of the National Youth Theatre at eighteen and stood backstage at the Royal Court thinking, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’

  My father didn’t want me to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. But he was horrified when I told him I wanted to be an actor. I’d acted at school, where the headmaster had told him that it was ‘almost the only thing that David is really good at’, which wasn’t true at all because I was pretty good at rugby, tennis and cricket as well. But my father was still appalled at the idea of my becoming an actor and only very reluctantly accepted the inevitable.

  Full of enthusiasm, I auditioned for the Central School of Music and Drama in London, but they turned me down flat because I couldn’t sing, which upset me so much that I didn’t even bother going to the audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A few weeks later, however, I did pluck up the courage to audition for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and they offered me a place.

  Not that I fitted in exactly. I was still living at home with my parents and I turned up for my first day at LAMDA in 1966 wearing a suit and tie, when everyone else was wearing Beatle caps and jeans. Then I arrived at my first movement class wearing my school rugby colours and was instantly sent out to buy a leotard and tights. One of the teachers even tried to persuade me to buy a pair of jeans, but I never managed to get into them because my thighs were too big – all those days of rugby at school.

  In fact, I don’t think LAMDA thought very much of me as an actor at first – at least until I was cast by the former child star Jeremy Spenser as the Mayor, Hebble Tyson, in Christopher Fry’s 1948 comedy-drama The Lady’s Not for Burning. It was my first character part, and it helped me find my metier. LAMDA thought so too because they awarded me a prize as their best student when I left.

  From London, I went into rep as an assistant stage manager at the Gateway Theatre in Chester in 1969, working on a new play every two weeks. But that was only a start, and in the years that followed, there were some very lean times. I spent a good deal of time at the start of my career ‘resting’, as we actors like to call being out of work. To sustain myself in the early 1970s, I found myself unloading lorry loads of dog food, then working as a lift operator in a block of flats, and finally, selling and hiring formal wear at Moss Bros.

  In fact, I was so terrified that I was never going to work as an actor again that when Moss Bros generously offered me an apprenticeship as a junior manager, I was all set to accept it. But fate intervened. On the very morning when I was going to say yes, I got a call offering me a part in a television show called The Protectors, starring Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter, which was shooting at that very moment in Venice. I didn’t hesitate – I took the plane to Venice. It was the end of my career in men’s wear.

  Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to work regularly in the theatre, in films and on radio and television. I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973, at the age of twenty-seven, and loved it, just as I loved appearing in films like Song for Europe, Harry and the Hendersons, with John Lithgow, and The Falcon and the Snowman, with Sean Penn and Tim Hutton, as well as A World Apart, where I played a distinctly frightening South African police interrogator.

  But it was Blott, on television, that made me – Tom Sharpe rang me in tears to say that he’d never expected to see his character so beautifully portrayed. I was very touched.

  That was why Brian Eastman, the Brighton-born film and television producer who’d produced Blott for the BBC, rang me up on that autumn evening in 1987 and asked if he could come round to see me and take me out to dinner. He’s a tall, slim man who likes to work with people he knows and respects. As a result of Blott, we’d become friends – so I said yes.

  Brian arrived at the house, had a chat with my wife Sheila and saw my son and daughter, Robert and Katherine, who were then six and four, before taking me out to the local Indian restaurant.

  That’s how we ended up sitting opposite each other over a chicken madras and a vegetable biryani when Brian said suddenly, ‘Have you read much of Agatha Christie?’

  I blanched. The honest truth was that I’d never read any at all, not so much as a single book. My father, a wonderful man and a leading gynaecologist in his day, had always encouraged my elder brother John, my younger brother Peter and me to read, but had also told us: ‘Read the greats, never forget Shakespeare, challenge yourselves.’ We’d all taken his advice, and it was one reason why I’d loved playing Tolstoy’s poor Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata.

  ‘Well, to be honest, Brian, I haven’t read any,’ I said rather meekly. ‘She’s really not my style. But I know she has a great many fans.’

  Brian seemed untroubled. ‘Have you seen any of the Poirot films?’ he asked, putting his spoon into the pilau rice.

  I’d done more than that. I’d actually appeared in one.

  ‘I appeared with Peter Ustinov in the CBS film Thirteen at Dinner in 1985, just before I did Iago,’ I told him. ‘I played Inspector Japp.’

  In fact, I’d taken the job to make a little money before going up to Stratford, which I knew wouldn’t make me a great deal. I had a young family to support. What I didn’t tell Brian was that I thought Inspector Japp was probably the worst performance I’d ever given in my life. I didn’t know what on earth to do with the part and so, for some unfathomable reason, I’d decided to play him like a kind of Jewish bookie and make him eat whenever he appeared on the screen. I even made him eat Poirot’s breakfast in one scene, which amused Ustinov hugely.

  Peter and I had talked about Poirot while we were filming. He liked the part because he could bring out what he saw as the comedy in the role, but he knew that he could never play the Poirot that Agatha Christie had actually written. Peter was too large, physically and as a character, for the true Poirot; his own personality got in the way, and he used the accent as part of his comic armoury.

  But, during a break in the filming one day, Peter did say to me, ‘You could play Poirot, you know, and you would be very good at it.’ It was extremely flattering of him, but I did not take the idea very seriously. That conversation came back to me that October night, as Brian Eastman and I talked over our Indian meal.

  ‘I’ve seen Albert Finney, of course,’ I told him, as he pushed a plate of rice across the table, ‘in Murder on the Orient Express, which I really enjoyed.’

  I remember thinking privately that Albert’s performance in the 1974 film had struck me as rather tense and stiff – he hardly ever seemed to move his neck – while his accent had been very gruff, almost angry. But that didn’t detract from his excellent performance, nor the superb cast, which included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud and Sean Connery, who used to live not that far away from me in Acton when he was still married to the achingly beautiful Diane Cilento.

  Brian took another mouthful of curry and then said, ‘Well, I’ve taken the idea of a new series of television films based on Poirot to ITV in London, and they’re very keen on making ten one-hour films from the short stories next year.’

  He paused, then dropped his bombshell.

  ‘And we are very keen that you should play Poirot.’

  My spoonful of curry stopped halfway to my mouth. I was, quite literally, astounded. I can remember the shock to this day.

  Me, the serious Shakespearean actor, portrayer of men with
haunted souls whose dark deeds forever surround them, playing a fastidious, balding detective; I couldn’t quite grasp the idea, but I didn’t say no. I was too astonished.

  As we left the restaurant, Brian said, ‘I’ll send you some of the books. Have a look at them and see what you think.’ Then he disappeared into the night, and I walked home to Sheila in a daze.

  Two days later, a couple of the full-length Poirot novels arrived, and shortly afterwards, a copy of Poirot’s Casebook, containing some of the short stories that Brian thought should make up the first series of ten television programmes. I was intrigued, but I also thought I’d better know what I might be getting myself into. So I started to read them.

  And as I did so, it slowly dawned on me that I’d never actually seen the character I was reading about on the screen. He wasn’t like Albert Finney, or Peter Ustinov, or Ian Holm in the 1986 BBC drama Murder by the Book. He was quite, quite different: more elusive, more pedantic and, most of all, more human than the person I’d seen on the screen.

  But I still wasn’t sure whether I should play him. So I decided to ask my elder brother John, who was then a newscaster at Independent Television News in London. He is two years older than I am, and I’ve always looked up to him, so I rang him.

  ‘John,’ I said, a little nervously, ‘do you read Agatha Christie?’

  There was a slight pause at the other end of the line. ‘Not in recent years,’ he said, ‘but I’ve dipped into one or two in the past.’

  ‘Do you know her character Hercule Poirot?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, he’s her most famous creation.’

  ‘Well, they’re thinking of making ten one-hour films of his stories, with me playing the role. Only I don’t know the character. What do you think of him?’