Poirot and Me (36 page)

member of her cast with individual qualities,

including a motive for murder. That is why,

so often, it seems as though every single

character in her story could have committed

the crime.

For my part, I certainly find that it helps

me to work from the denouement backwards

when I first read a new Poirot script. To look

at it that way round establishes each

individual character in my mind, and allows

me to check, as we go along, that all the

relevant facts that are necessary for the

conclusion really do appear in the story

itself. It is one reason why the denouements

in the films have grown slightly longer.

These are Poirot’s moment of theatre, the

culmination of all that has gone before, and

the time when he commands the story and

its characters completely. It is there that he

resolves the puzzle that is the crime itself.

Since the arrival of Michele Buck and

Damien Timmer, we had started filming with

two cameras running simultaneously. That

meant that I could deliver my explanation at

the end of the film in one long speech –

sometimes taking twenty minutes to do so –

without

ever

stopping

filming.

The

denouement was my opportunity to bring my

own theatre experience to the film, because

I did not need to take a break.

Not that I find learning the denouements

easy. In fact, it has grown steadily harder as

the years have passed, but there is no other

way that I can do it except by learning it all

in detail. I rely on my discipline as a stage

actor – which is what I am, above and

beyond even Poirot. I learn the lines myself,

but there are also two people who have

heard every single line of my Poirot – my

driver Sean and Sheila. Just as I had for the

very first series, I still practised my lines with

Sean in the car on the way to the set, and

Sheila and I always worked together on

learning the script, and especially the

denouements. She would play all the other

characters for me, as I rehearsed my lines

with her.

It was hard work, and sometimes we

found ourselves getting up at four or five in

the morning, learning lines for an hour until

the car came to take me to the set. When I’d

come back, at eight that evening, I would

have a bowl of soup and then we would

spend another hour and a half or so going

over my lines again, before going to bed at

ten, so that we could get up at four or five

the next morning to start the process all over

again.

Interestingly, in After the Funeral, which

was directed by a newcomer to the series,

Maurice Phillips, and shot in the summer of

2005, partly at Shepperton Studios and

partly at Rotherfield Park in Hampshire,

there were even some backstage moments

in a theatre, which I thought made the story

even better, because they played to Poirot’s

sense of the theatrical and brought into

focus everything I was trying to do as an

actor in the denouement.

There were also a series of other delights

for me in the film. Sean, my driver, got his

first ever appearance on the screen, playing

the part of Poirot’s driver in an echo of what

we did every single morning, though he was

not hearing my lines and he did not make

any comment whatever – in real life he

certainly does! Plus, Geraldine James was

terrific to work with – again – and the cast

were incredibly supportive, with Anthony

Valentine

giving

a

superb

cameo

performance as an Italian.

I enjoyed After the Funeral, but it was not

as significant to me as the third film in the

new

series, Cards on the Table , which

brought one of the biggest and most

important changes to my life as Poirot on

film: the arrival of the idiosyncratic crime

writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, played by the

wonderful Zoë Wanamaker.

When Dame Agatha first started Cards on

the Table , which was published in 1936, she

had an idea for a story that would assemble

four murderers and four detectives together

in a single flat for two games of bridge – one

for the murderers, and the other for the

detectives. The ninth person in the flat, the

host, who does not play bridge with either

group, is sitting in a chair in the room in

which the four murderers are playing, and

becomes the murder victim. The question

Dame Agatha posed was simple – which of

the murderers committed the crime, and

which of the sleuths would solve it?

Worried that her readers might not like

such a straightforward plot – with just four

apparent suspects – Dame Agatha explained

in the foreword to her novel, ‘The deduction

must, therefore, be entirely psychological,

but it is none the less interesting for that,

because when all is said and done it is the

mind of the murderer that is of supreme

interest.’ As so often in her stories, it is the

psychology of the characters that drives the

solution.

One of the four detectives is Mrs Ariadne

Oliver, a crime writer who has created a

Finnish detective called Sven Hjerson, and is,

quite obviously, a fictional self-portrait of

Dame Agatha herself. For me, she is one of

Dame Agatha’s most endearing characters, a

view shared by her second husband, Max

Mallowan, as he confirms in his memoirs.

Significantly, after twenty years of writing

Poirot stories by this time, she gives Mrs

Oliver a telling series of explanations about

why she has become bored with her Finnish

fictional detective. ‘I only regret one thing,’

Ariadne admits to Superintendant Battle,

another of the detectives (who is actually

called Wheeler in our film, though I don’t

know why), ‘making my detective a Finn. I

really don’t know anything about Finns and

I’m always getting letters from Finland

pointing out something impossible that he’s

said and done.’ There is very little doubt that

Dame Agatha was expressing her own

growing feelings of dissatisfaction with

Poirot.

Dame Agatha must have liked her fictional

alter ego, however, for Ariadne Oliver was to

turn up regularly in Poirot stories from then

on, and, in particular, in the ones that our

production team wanted to film in the future.

As a result, they were looking for one actress

who would play her from now on, and

suggested to me that they would like to cast

Zoë Wanamaker in the part. I was thrilled by

the idea, because Zoë and I had first joined

forces on the stage in 1978, in the RSC’s

season, and later appeared together in the

Company’s iconic production of Once in a

Lifetime, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s

1930 satirical comedy about the effect of

talking pictures on Hollywood. (Ironically,

shortly after we finished this series of Poirot,

I was to reprise my role of the studio boss

for a new production at the National Theatre

in London.)

The Hart and Kaufman comedy was one of

my happiest memories in the first years of

my stage career, and Zoë and I had become

very close. Of all the actresses I know, she is

the one that feels most like a sister to me.

We seem to act together instinctively, and I

was delighted when she accepted a contract

to play Mrs Oliver in all the remaining Poirot

films. I knew it would be a great reunion,

and that the sparks would fly whenever we

appeared together.

Wonderful though it was be to be back

with Zoë, there was a far bigger issue that

had come to preoccupy me about the films

since the new production team had taken

over: the fact that Poirot did not have a

home. He was now always somewhere else,

never at home, and, as a result, had become

far too much like so many other detectives,

because he had lost his domestic life. The

studio set for his old flat in Whitehaven

Mansions had been dismantled, and I was

beginning to feel that Poirot was increasingly

adrift – especially as he no longer had

Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon.

I wanted him to have a home again, and

so I asked for a meeting with Michele Buck

and Damien Timmer to discuss it. To my

intense relief, they both agreed with me and

asked the designer, Jeff Tessler, to create

one for us – which was to remain in place

until The Big Four, in the very final series of

Poirot films. When he had finished, Jeff

asked me to come to the set early one

morning to see it – and he was very nervous

indeed, because he knew how particular I

was about Poirot and everything he did.

Before Jeff and I walked into the studio to

see the new flat, I paused and got into

character, so that I could look at it through

Poirot’s eyes. I am so glad that I did,

because when I walked into it, I was almost

in tears. It was so perfect for Poirot. Every

single tiny detail was right, from the bonsai

tree that he trims, to the clock on the

mantelpiece; from the square furniture with

orange upholstery, in true Art Deco style, to

the chrome side tables. It had exactly the

precision and symmetry that he would have

wanted. It meant that Poirot had his own

home again.

It even had one of my own clocks in it. I

am a great lover and collector of clocks, and

not long after the change in production

team, I spotted, in one of my favourite clock

shops, a magnificent Art Deco clock, with a

marble base and two columns standing

beside a diamond-shaped face, and with a

chrome dog standing on top of it. I knew

that Poirot describes an almost exactly

similar clock, though with a fox on top of it,

which he would stroke and then polish away

his fingerprints with his handkerchief. I

bought the clock at once and donated it to

the production, and it sat on the mantelpiece

of his new flat.

That marvellous Art Deco clock is now in

my own flat, but it was not the only

similarity between Poirot’s home and mine. I

love barometers, and insisted that Poirot’s

new flat should have one – just I have

several at home. The bonsai tree that Jeff

put into the new flat is also now back in my

own flat – and I even have the little set of

gardening tools that Poirot used to look after

the tiny tree. It all seems to prove that,

somehow or other, I have some of the same

obsessions he does.

Another part of the domestic life that I

wanted to create for Poirot again was a

manservant. There was no longer a Miss

Lemon to look after him, but Cards on the

Table called for him to have a valet, a man

called George, who attended to his every

need.

I knew the actor I wanted to play the part.

Just before we had started filming, I had

appeared in a revival of Terence Rattigan’s

1963 play Man and Boy, at the Duchess

Theatre in London, which was very well

received. One of the other leading actors,

who played my assistant Sven in the play,

was David Yelland, who is exactly the same

age as I am, but looks rather younger, and

whose daughter Hannah had already

appeared in a Poirot film, Lord Edgware

Dies. David made his name playing the

future King Edward VIII in the film Chariots

of Fire, and I could think of no one who could

play the role of George better than he would.

Like Zoë, he was contracted to play the part

throughout every remaining Poirot film in

which George appeared.

Directed by another newcomer, Sarah

Harding, and with a screenplay by Nick Dear,

who had written The Hollow, Cards on the

Table also starred Honeysuckle Weeks, from

the television series Foyle’s War , and the