Poirot and Me (31 page)

where the events were said to have taken

place after he had been ‘disentangling some

military scandal in Syria’. In our film, Clive

took another liberty with the original in

making Poirot’s reason for being in Baghdad

an invitation from none other than the exotic

and mysterious Countess Rossakoff, who had

played no part whatever in Dame Agatha’s

original story.

One other interesting point struck me as

we began filming. At the end of the original

novel, Poirot leaves for Syria again, only to

find himself ‘mixed up’ in another murder,

this time on the Orient Express on his way

home. Dame Agatha’s famous mystery about

those events was actually published two

years

before Murder in Mesopotamia, in

1934, but the link between the two is

unmistakable.

Our location in Tunisia was a real

archaeological dig, and the cast of extras

working on the site seemed positively

enormous. The murder victim is the wife of

the expedition’s leader, Dr Eric Leidner, who

is surrounded by Dame Agatha’s customary

collection of idiosyncratic characters, all of

whom may have had a motive for the killing

his wife. Once again, there is a locked-room

element to the mystery, as well as elements

of ‘time-shifting’, one of Dame Agatha’s

favourite plot devices. The denouement is

also one of the longest in the whole series,

and may have added to the slightly slow

pace of the film, but the location added a

very particular glamour.

Back in London, we started on the second

of the two-hour films in this eighth series,

Evil Under the Sun. Written when Dame

Agatha was working two days a week in the

dispensary at University College Hospital in

London, in the early days of the war, where

she was known as Mrs Mallowan rather than

Mrs Christie, it was published in 1941 to

great

acclaim.

The

Times

Literary

Supplement in particular applauded it, saying

that ‘It will take a lot of beating . . . she

springs her secret like a landmine,’ while the

Daily

Telegraph

was

even

more

complimentary,

suggesting

that

Dame

Agatha has ‘never written anything better’

and calling it ‘detective story writing at its

best’.

It is certainly a fine story and it did bring

our film one great advantage – it was to be

shot at the extraordinary Burgh Island Hotel,

built by an eccentric millionaire called

Archibald Nettlefold on a tiny island just off

the south Devon coast, not far from

Kingsbridge. It is one of the finest Art Deco

hotels in England, complete with its own

motorised sea-tractor to take its guests to

and from the mainland. That meant that I

spent a very happy few days there in

September 2000, in the midst of some of the

most beautiful seaside scenery in the

country.

The screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, once

again took the occasional small liberty with

Dame Agatha’s original story. In the novel,

Poirot is just taking a few days’ rest from

Whitehaven Mansions, but in our version, he

is taken ill at a new restaurant that Captain

Hastings has backed in London, partly on the

basis of his experiences in Argentina, called

El Ranchero. But when he and Hastings

arrive at the Sandy Cove Health Resort, as

we renamed the Burgh Island Hotel, the

original story and our new version came

together again.

The story is about a famous actress called

Arlena Stuart, who is also a guest on the

island. Poirot immediately fears that a

murder may be committed, not least

because so many of the other guests seem

to dislike her intensely. ‘There is evil

everywhere under the sun,’ Poirot says

carefully when one guest remarks what a

beautiful day it is on the coast, and he tries

to prevent the murder, but without success.

The actress’s body is discovered on the

beach and the denouement reveals a

supremely complex plot that allows every

single suspect a fine alibi.

The story had been filmed before, in 1981,

by the director Guy Hamilton, and with a

script by the playwright Anthony Shaffer

(incidentally, the brother of Peter, writer of

Amadeus). Peter Ustinov had played Poirot,

leading a cast that included James Mason

and Dame Maggie Smith, but the critics felt

it was a little bland by comparison with

Dame Agatha’s very finest work.

I was a little uneasy. I felt that both the

new films we made that summer had seen

our Poirot series marking time, neither

moving him on as a character. It was as if

we were standing still, resting on our laurels,

not trying to make each and every new film

more interesting and more challenging,

which had been my ambition from the very

beginning. These two new films were

certainly watchable, and they clearly

delighted around the world, but I wondered

privately if there was an element or two

lacking, in particular a sense of excitement

and imagination.

Perhaps that was reflected in the reception

they got when they were finally broadcast by

ITV in Britain. It was to be July and

December

2002

before Murder

in

Mesopotamia and Evil Under the Sun were

aired, and by then, the intensity of the initial

wave of Poirot fever seemed to have ebbed.

There was none of the buzz that had

surrounded the arrival of the first and second

series a few years earlier. Their popularity

around the world may have been growing,

but at home, they seemed to be gently on

the wane.

Chapter 14

‘ONE OF THE TURNING

POINTS . . .A LEGACY

TO DAME AGATHA’

As 2000 came to an end, I put the slight

sense of unease I felt about ‘treading

water’ as Poirot behind me, and turned in a

quite different direction – to a radically

different character. I made a two-hour crime

drama for the BBC called NCS: Manhunt, in

which I could hardly have been further from

Poirot. I was playing a very contemporary

British detective inspector in a distinctly

gritty drama, complete with a poorly fitting

trench coat, a bad-tempered expression,

awful manners and no moustache whatever.

Even worse, I always seemed to be shouting

at everyone around me.

I could hardly have come further from the

delicate manners of the little Belgian, but

there were consolations. I was playing

alongside Samantha Bond, who had played

in The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, but who

was now detective sergeant to my detective

inspector in the National Crime Squad, with

Kenneth Cranham as our team’s target – a

sociopathic murderer and kidnapper – in a

two-hour film played on two consecutive

nights on BBC1. In fact, I ended up playing

the same part in another two-hour film a few

months later, but that was just the first part

of my journey away from Poirot in the new

Millennium.

Not long after the first NCS, I found myself

playing

an

apparently

respectable

headmaster who makes a terrible mistake in

Murder in Mind: Teacher, once again for the

BBC. This time, my character killed a gay

man in self-defence, only to find himself

encouraged to murder again by his daughter,

to cover up the original killing. Interestingly,

the young man who was killed was played by

none other than the Scottish actor James

McAvoy, who became a television star in

State of Play and Shameless in Britain, and

then conquered Hollywood with films like

The Last King of Scotland and X-Men.

I cannot really explain why, but in the

absence of Poirot, darker and darker roles

seemed to be finding their way towards me,

and none was darker than that of Augustus

Melmotte in a four-part adaptation of

Anthony Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece The

Way We Live Now for the BBC.

With a magnificent screenplay by Andrew

Davies, this was costume drama at its very

finest: a wonderful cast, beautiful locations,

costumes and props, and memorable

characters, not least the villain, my

character, Melmotte. He was a sinister

Jewish

financier

from

a

mysterious

background, who arrived in the London of

the 1870s to make his mark and his fortune.

High society fell over itself to meet him, and

take advantage of his money.

Melmotte was as delicious a part as Salieri

had been in Amadeus, and I could not wait

to play him, not least because he reminded

me very strongly of another mysterious

foreign financier who had arrived in London

to charm society – though this time in the

1970s rather than a century before – the

charismatic, Czechoslovakian-born Robert

Maxwell.

Just as I had done at the beginning of

Poirot, to prepare myself for Melmotte, I

read every biography of Maxwell I could find,

and I found that reading about him gave me

an insight into what Melmotte might have

been like and how he might have behaved in

nineteenth-century London. Maxwell worked

in very similar ways, which I confirmed in a

meeting with Maxwell’s widow, Elizabeth,

who kindly gave me an even greater insight

into her late husband and the way he

operated.

Strangely, the more I understood about

Maxwell – and Melmotte – the more I

wondered if, just perhaps, there might be

something of both of them in me. After all,

as I admitted to one interviewer at the time,

‘I’m a mixed grill of Russian, French and

Jewish descent,’ although I was to find out

later that there was, in fact, no French in

there at all. And even though some of my

ancestry was partly Jewish, I turned to

Christianity just two years before I started

playing Poirot.

Whatever the truth about our similar

origins, however, there was certainly

something about them both that fascinated

me, and made me all the more determined

to inhabit Melmotte just as completely as I

had Poirot. That feeling became even

stronger when I read Trollope’s own

description of Melmotte in his autobiography.

It reminded me just what a contemporary

figure he was.

Nevertheless, a certain class of

dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in

its proportions, and climbing into high

places, has become at the same time

so rampant and so splendid that there

seems to be reason for fearing that

men and women will be taught to feel

that dishonesty, if it can become

splendid, will cease to be abominable.

If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous

palace with pictures on all its walls

and gems in all its cupboards, with

marble and ivory in all its corners, and

can give Apician dinners, and get into

Parliament, and deal in millions, then

dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the

man dishonest after such a fashion is

not a low scoundrel.

That was what I wanted to bring to the

screen: a man who made dishonesty

acceptable, even fashionable, a man who

loved to act as the spider in a web of his

own creation, to capture unsuspecting flies,

render them helpless by his charm, and then

devour them. It was the most perfect

challenge

for

a

character

actor.

As

Christopher Howse put it in the Daily

Telegraph, ‘Melmotte is as powerful a

character as Fagin,’ and I knew I could bring

him to life.

No expense was spared on the production.

The budget was rumoured to be more than

£7 million, and the cast included Matthew

Macfadyen and Paloma Baeza, as well as

Cheryl Campbell, Tony Britton, Rob Brydon

and Cillian Murphy, and it was largely shot in