Poirot and Me Read online

  There was a distinct hush.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,’ John said firmly.

  ‘Seriously?’ I blurted out.

  ‘Yes. I mean, Poirot’s a bit of a joke, a buffoon. It’s not you at all.’

  I gulped.

  ‘Well, what I’m reading isn’t a buffoon,’ I told him. ‘It’s a character that I’ve never seen portrayed.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘It would be a wonderful challenge to see if I could bring that character to the screen,’ I said, stumbling on.

  There was a slight sigh. John is an enormously kind and gentle man, and would never want to upset me.

  ‘Of course, you must do it if you want to,’ he said quietly. ‘Good luck. Only one word of warning: it may be difficult to get people to take him seriously.’

  It turned out he was quite right.

  But the more I thought about the man in Dame Agatha’s books, the more convinced I became that I could bring the true Poirot to life on the screen, a man no audience had seen before. And so, a few days later, I rang Brian Eastman.

  ‘I think I’d like to do it, Brian,’ I said, with my heart in my mouth. It was just after the New Year of 1988.

  ‘That’s wonderful news,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll be in touch with your agent. No one else was approached, you know. You were our first choice – and I’m absolutely delighted you’d like to play him.’

  So began the long journey to bring Poirot to life for millions, and to do that, I knew I had to discover every single thing I could about the detective with the small waxed moustache and those ever-present ‘little grey cells’.

  I started by collecting copies of all the novels and short stories featuring him and piled them up beside my bed. I wanted to get to the very heart of what Dame Agatha thought of him and what he was really like, and to do that, I had to read every word his creator had ever written about him. I didn’t want my Poirot to be a caricature, something made up in a film or television studio, I wanted him to be real, as real as he was in the books, as real as I could possibly make him.

  The first thing I realised was that I was a slightly too young to play him. He was a retired police detective in his sixties when he first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while I was in my early forties. Not only that, he was also described as a good deal fatter than I was. There was going to have to be some considerable padding, not to mention very careful make-up and costume, if I was going to convince the world that I was the great Hercule Poirot.

  Even more important, the more I read about him, the more convinced I became that he was a character that demanded to be taken seriously. He wasn’t a silly little man with a funny accent, any more than Sherlock Holmes was just a morphine addict with a taste for playing the violin. There was a depth and quality to the Poirot that Dame Agatha had created – and that was what I desperately wanted to bring to the screen.

  I took the role of Poirot because it precisely symbolised everything I believed about being an actor, which I hadn’t truly discovered until well after I’d started out in Chester, at the age of twenty-three, back in 1969.

  In my first years in the profession, I struggled to find my identity, to understand why I was actually doing it. What was it that I wanted to be as an actor exactly? Was it just about dressing up and becoming someone else? Was I desperate to become some kind of star?

  I was confused. I’d achieved part of my dream – I’d become a professional actor – but what did that mean? What did I want?

  I was so uncertain that I looked up the dictionary definition of what an actor was. It defined it as a thespian, a theatre player – but that was really no help to me at all. It didn’t strike any kind of chord. If my only objective was to strut around the stage or the film studio pretending to be someone else, I didn’t feel comfortable.

  There was no real purpose in that for me; it just didn’t fit the man I knew I was: the serious, slightly reserved son of a South African-born gynaecologist and an English actress who was the daughter of a music-hall artist from Kent, and who’d gone on to become a dancer on the West End stage herself.

  Deep down I knew that I didn’t want to pretend to be someone else; I wanted to inhabit them, to bring them to life. The longer I thought about it, the more I realised that what I really wanted to do was to become different people, to transform myself into them. I wanted to be a character actor, not a star. That was what I enjoyed, that was what acting really meant to me.

  It was at that moment that I also realised that the playwright or screenwriter of any piece I appeared in depended on me as an actor to give his or her character a personality and voice. That was what excited me, because without character and personality, there can be no drama. I was convinced that my purpose as an actor was to become the writer’s voice.

  That understanding came like a thunderclap. I realised – suddenly – that it wasn’t about me. It was about the character I was lucky enough to play, and my job was to bring out the truth in the character – and what the writer wanted. Ultimately, that was what really lay behind my decision to play Poirot.

  That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book. I wanted to try to explain what being a character actor means for me, and how it can sustain you even if you play a single part for more than a quarter of a century. I don’t think any actors have ever really attempted that before – not Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett, who both played Sherlock Holmes; nor John Thaw, who played Inspector Morse; nor Raymond Burr, who brought us both Perry Mason and Ironside; nor even Richard Chamberlain, who was Doctor Kildare for all those years.

  I wanted to try to explain what my craft and profession mean to me personally, especially when I’ve had the good fortune to be asked to play a man who is known, and loved, by so many millions of people around the world.

  And so it was that ‘inhabiting’ Dame Agatha’s Poirot preoccupied me in those first months of 1988. I wanted to understand everything about him, to become him, and to make him as real to the world as he was becoming to me. He gave my work a purpose, and I hoped that I would repay my debt to his creator by bringing him truly to life – in all his dimensions – for the first time.

  Just as I was beginning to immerse myself in him, however, I was offered a part in a small British film based on a Michael Morpurgo children’s story called When the Whales Came. It was a charming piece set in the Scilly Isles, thirty miles out from Land’s End in the north Atlantic, about two children who set out to save a beached narwhal that had landed on their shores, and in doing so saved their island from a curse.

  The stars were to be my old National Youth Theatre friend Helen Mirren and the unforgettable but distinctly shy Paul Scofield, Oscar-winner for his performance in the film of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons in 1966, as well as receiving a Tony for playing Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on Broadway in 1979. His portrayal of King Lear has been described as ‘the greatest ever Shakespearean performance’, and he was undoubtedly one of the finest actors of his generation. Filming would take ten weeks on the Scillies between April and June, and I was to play the third lead, a local fisherman called Will.

  It wasn’t an enormous part, but it was a beautiful place to be, and I thought it would give me a chance to read even more Poirot, away from the demands of London and the telephone. Besides, Sheila and the children could visit me on the islands, which would give us all a week together during the half-term holiday.

  So it was that I spent the beautiful spring of 1988 on the smallest of the Scilly Isles, Bryher, where the film was being shot, spending my spare time reading Poirot stories.

  The more I did so, the more the little man entranced me. There were so many foibles, so many little habits that some people found hard to understand, so many mannerisms – his need for order, his dislike of the country, his determination to carry a silver ‘Turnip’ pocket watch wherever he went. Each was as idiosyncratic as the next, and each as fascinating.

 
Then, as the warm winds of May turned into an even warmer June, I started to write my private list of Poirot’s habits and character. I called it my ‘dossier of characteristics’. It ended up five pages long and detailed ninety-three different aspects of his life. I have the list to this day – in fact, I carried it around on the set with me throughout all my years as Poirot, just as I gave a copy to every director I worked with on a Poirot film.

  The first note I made read simply: ‘Belgian! NOT French.’

  The second said: ‘Drinks tisane – hardly ever tea, which he calls “the English Poison”. Will drink coffee – black only.’

  The third echoed the same theme: ‘Has four lumps of sugar in tea and coffee – sometimes three. Once or twice, five!’

  ‘Wears pointed, tight, very shiny patent leather shoes,’ said the fourth, while the fifth added, ‘Bows a great deal – even when shaking hands.’

  Very gradually, from reading the books and keeping a note of every single item that illuminated his character, I was building a picture of the man I was about to play.

  ‘Hates to fly. Makes him feel sick,’ my list went on, but then also: ‘Hates travelling by water. Uses the “so excellent Laverguier method” to prevent sea-sickness.’

  ‘Regards his moustaches as a thing of perfect beauty,’ said my eighth note to myself. ‘Uses scented pomade.’

  ‘Order and method are his “GODS”,’ was my ninth commandment, and the next: ‘A man of faith and morals. Regards himself as “un bon Catholique”. Reads his Bible every night before he goes to sleep.’ The more I read about Poirot, the greater the respect I found for his creator. I had not realised that the woman born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on 15 September 1890, in my own father’s favourite seaside resort of Torquay in Devon, was the best-selling novelist of all time.

  Nor did I know that her books had sold some two billion copies around the world, that she was the most translated individual author ever – appearing in 103 languages – and that hers are ranked the third most widely published books in history, after the works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

  Perhaps if I’d known all those things when I started out on the project, I might have been even more terrified at the prospect of playing Poirot and satisfying her millions of fans.

  After all, they had a lot of experience of him: all those novels and short stories over fifty-five years. Indeed, even though Dame Agatha had professed to become ‘tired’ of him in the late 1940s, she nevertheless continued to write about him until 1972, when Collins published Elephants Can Remember. They went on to publish Curtain: Poirot’s Final Case, which she had written many years earlier, just a few months before her death at the age of eighty-five in January 1976.

  So, utterly determined to get Poirot as right as Dame Agatha would have wanted him, I sat in my room in the Hell Bay Hotel on Bryher, steadily compiling my ever-expanding list of his characteristics.

  Number eleven read: ‘A great thinker who says he has “undoubtedly the finest brain in Europe”,’ while number thirteen added: ‘Conceited professionally – but not as a person.’ Fourteen said: ‘Loves his work and genuinely believes he is the best in the world and expects everyone to know him,’ although fifteen conceded: ‘Dislikes publicity.’

  Every day Poirot’s complexities and contradictions, his vanities and idiosyncrasies, became ever clearer in my mind, but as they did so, I began to worry about his voice.

  In fact, in the ten weeks I spent on Bryher, it was Poirot’s voice that worried me the most. I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so.

  ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies.

  ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’

  I started experimenting by talking to myself in a whole range of voices, some of them coming from my head – all nasal and clipped – others coming from my chest, lower and a little slower, even a little gruff. Nothing sounded quite like the man I had been reading about in bed every night. They all sounded a little false, and that was the very last thing that I wanted.

  I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell.

  It certainly wasn’t the only one. I wanted to discover everything I could about the great detective, and as I read, I realised that there were some clues at hand. In the midst of compiling my list of Poirot’s characteristics, I came across a letter the great man had apparently written himself in April 1936, to his American publisher. It appeared in an American omnibus of his stories, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Thirteen at Dinner – or Lord Edgware Dies, as it is known in England – and it answered at least some of the questions in my mind.

  ‘What was my first case?’ Poirot wrote to ‘Monsieur Dodd’.

  I began work as a member of the detective force in Brussels on the Abercrombie Forgery Case in 1904, and for many years was proud to be a member of the detective service in my native Belgium. Since the closing of the war, I have, as you know, been in London, having rooms for some time with mon vieux ami Hastings, at 14, Farraway Street, under the motherly supervision of Mrs Pearson.

  As I read it, I remember being struck at how similar it all seemed to Sherlock Holmes, with Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson in 221B Baker Street. What I didn’t know, as I read, was exactly how much his creator had been influenced by the exploits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective. Dame Agatha had been an avid reader of Holmes as a young woman and although she’d decided to make her detective as different in personality from Holmes as she possibly could, she’d liked the idea of having a Dr Watson-like friend and helper who could be the narrator of the story – enter Captain Hastings. And she’d liked the notion of a kindly housekeeper to look after them.

  Keeping Poirot as different as she could from Holmes was absolutely vital, because his books were still appearing when she began to write her first Poirot story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear was published in 1915, when she was planning Poirot, and his next story, His Last Bow, in 1917, appeared after Dame Agatha had finished her first draft of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first book and Poirot’s first appearance.

  It was inevitable that Dame Agatha’s detective would set himself quite apart from Holmes. ‘How, you ask, would I be recognised in a crowd?’ she had him write to his American publisher. ‘What is there distinctive about my appearance? Alas, I have none of those theatrical peculiarities which distinguish the detectives in story books.’

  Not quite true, I remember thinking, but I saw her point.

  True, I have my little prejudices. Anything in the least crooked or disorderly is a torment to me. In my bookcase, I arrange the tallest books at the end; then the next tallest; and so on. My medicine bottles are placed in a neatly graduated row. If your necktie were not correct, I should find it irresistible not to make it straight for you. Should there be a morsel of omelette on your coat, a speck of dust on your collar, I must correct these . . . For my breakfast, I have only toast which is cut into neat little squares. The eggs – there must be two – they must be identical in size. I confess to you that I will stoop to pick up a burnt match from a flower bed and bury it neatly.

  But Poirot denies that he’s a little man, insisting fiercely:

  I am five feet four inches high. My head, it is egg-shaped and I carry it a little to one side, the left. My eyes, I am told, shine green when I am excited. My boots are patent leather, smart and shiny. My stick is embossed wi
th a gold band. My watch is large and keeps the time exactly. My moustache is the finest in all London. You see, mon ami? You comprehend? Hercule Poirot stands before you.

  Well yes, he did, there was no doubt of that, and he certainly was not Sherlock Holmes. Yet the more I read, the more uncertain I was about his voice. I could hear the accent – but what was it? Seeing Poirot was one thing – I was sure that Brian Eastman and I could settle that – but hearing him, that was quite another matter.

  There was also the matter of what playing him might mean to my career. Was I in danger of losing myself in a single character? Would that overwhelm me? Would I fall into that actor’s trap of being typecast? I was determined not to, but I could sense a danger.

  One evening in early June, shortly before the filming of When the Whales Came came to an end on Bryher, and just weeks before I was due to start shooting the first of the Poirot films, I had a conversation with the film’s executive producer, Geoffrey Wansell, who was to become a dear friend and who is writing this book with me. We talked about my playing Poirot and what it might mean.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It will change your life forever. You will go through a door and never be able to go back through it again.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ I told him. ‘I’ll still be exactly the same person I am now: an actor. That’s all I ever want to be.’

  ‘Believe me, you won’t stay the same,’ he replied. ‘Everything will change, whether you want it to or not, and you won’t be able to go back. But that doesn’t mean for a moment that you’ll be typecast. Poirot may consume part of you while you’re playing him, but not every part of you.’

  That was what I wanted: to play the character of Poirot as I had played the characters of Blott or Freud. I was a character actor. And that’s exactly what I did. That was what I was doing now. I was going to become Poirot, not a ‘star’ personality performer.

  Shortly afterwards, I started the long trip home from Bryher – a boat to St Mary’s, the largest of the Scilly Isles, where the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson still had his bungalow, then a helicopter to Penzance, and then the long train ride back to Paddington and my house in Acton. As the journey progressed, I began to wonder exactly what I had let myself in for.