Poirot and Me (42 page)

In fact, most of her fans did not even know

that she had written a story about Poirot’s

death. When I talked to people about it, they

were almost all taken by surprise that she

had ever allowed him to die. It was as if it

were a secret that no one quite wanted to

tell. The little man was so loved by almost

everyone that it seemed blasphemous to

suggest that he might be mortal, even

though he was in his sixties when he first

appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles

in 1920, which meant that he would have

been, at the very least, 112 when he

appeared in his last full-length story,

Elephants Can Remember, in 1972.

Our films had always kept him ageless,

setting each story between 1936 and 1938,

to preserve the period flavour that was so

important to him and his stories, while also

ensuring that his strict moral code did not

seem out of place in the constantly changing

world of Britain, moving from the years of

austerity into the ‘swinging sixties’, and then

on into the recession-plagued 1970s. For us,

and the television audience, Poirot was stuck

in his time, and all the better for it.

But I still wanted to serve Dame Agatha,

complete the canon of the Poirot stories, and

then portray his death. I thought that would

give both the audience and me an

opportunity to say goodbye to him properly,

and allow me to complete a project that had

been so close to my heart. So few actors

ever get the chance to do that with a

character that they have inhabited for so

many years – any relationship you have is

usually cut off without a moment’s thought

or hesitation.

To complete the canon of seventy films

was, however, a big decision for ITV. The

shoots had grown more and more expensive,

wi t h Murder on the Orient Express costing

almost as much as a small-scale feature film,

at approaching £2 million, and to commit to

another five stories – including Curtain –

could comfortably cost them more than £9

million. I knew that it was going to be a hard

decision for them to make – especially as

they had spent so much already over the

years – but I still very much hoped that they

would take it.

There was nothing I could do to influence

them, however, and so I went back to work,

accepting an offer to play the leading role of

Joe Keller in the American Arthur Miller’s

great play, set during the Second World War,

about greed and the effect it can have on a

family, All My Sons. It was a tremendously

challenging part, which ended with my

character committing suicide off stage at the

end of every performance, which meant

eight times a week, hardly the cheeriest of

experiences for an actor. But I was lucky

enough to have not one but two dear friends

from Poirot with me, Zoë Wanamaker, who

was to play my wife Kate, and Jemima

Rooper, who had been with us in The Third

Girl.

Even though All My Sons was one of the

more gruelling nights in the theatre, a dark

portrait of my character’s utter lack of

conscience, it turned out to be a wonderful

experience. Directed by the experienced

Howard Davies, just a year older than me, it

seemed to work from the very beginning of

rehearsals, and just got better and better

after we opened in the West End at the end

of May 2010.

Thankfully, the critics seemed to agree,

because the opening night was greeted with

a standing ovation, and the critic from the

New York Times even reported hearing the

sound of weeping coming from the audience,

and when he turned to see where it was

coming from, ‘I saw a business-suited man

the size of a line-backer, his head buried in

his hands, being comforted by a petite

blonde woman.’

I was lucky enough to win the What’s On

Stage award as best actor for my

performance, while Zoë won the award for

best actress.

On Boxing Day 2011, ITV finally showed

The Clocks, which we had filmed no less

than two and a half years earlier, which

suggested to me that they still saw the films

as television special events, and encouraged

me to think that, perhaps, just perhaps, they

really would commit to filming the final five

stories in 2012, and finish them in 2013,

twenty-five years after we had filmed The

Adventure

of

the

Clapham

Cook at

Twickenham, way back in 1988.

But still no one was quite certain, and so I

accepted all sorts of offers, including playing

the lawyer Jaggers in a new BBC version of

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Finally,

however, I went back to the theatre again,

to play another of the great parts in the

history of contemporary American theatre,

the drunken, tight-fisted actor James Tyrone

in Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s

Journey into Night. We started rehearsals

just after Christmas 2011, and did a five-

week tour of the provinces, before bringing

the show into London on 2 April, for a five-

month run. Like Joe Keller, Tyrone is no

saint. He is a man who has driven his wife to

drug abuse and his sons to alcoholism, but

he represented a tremendous challenge, as

the part was one of the great peaks of

modern American drama.

Nothing could ever quite match the joy of

my experience in All My Sons, and O’Neill’s

play is a brutal examination of a truly

dysfunctional family, but I revelled in the

opportunity to explore Tyrone. As the critic

Michael Billington was kind enough to say, in

the Guardian, he thought I brought out

‘James’s forlorn passion for his wife: when he

tells her “it is you who are leaving us”, his

voice is filled with a sorrowful resignation

that stops the heart.’

The

audiences

were

enormously

enthusiastic, but I slowly began to realise

that they were certainly not all there to see

Eugene O’Neill’s work. After the show was

over, group after group of fans from all over

the world would come round to the stage

door of the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury

Avenue to see me, most of them fascinated

to meet both Poirot and me.

Some of them could not speak any English

at all – even though they had just sat

through almost three hours of the O’Neill

p l a y . The

Russians

were

particularly

enthusiastic. One group came over from

Moscow for the weekend to see the play,

even though they could not understand a

single word of it, because – as they told me,

in faltering English – ‘We come to see

Hercule Poirot.’ A Japanese group said

exactly the same thing, and so did a Chinese

group.

In the end, we put a map of the world up

on the wall inside the stage door in the

theatre and started to stick pins in it to

represent the countries that all the Poirot

lovers had come from to see the play. By the

time I finished the run, in August 2012, there

were pins everywhere around the world. It

was an extraordinary commentary on Poirot’s

success at touching the hearts of so many

people.

But now, Poirot really did come back into

my life again – even if it was to be for the

final time. During the latter part of the run of

Long Day’s Journey into Night, ITV decided

that they would indeed make the final five

films, and they wanted to make them in one

sequence, ending with Curtain, but I knew

that would be utterly beyond me, and Poirot.

If you read Dame Agatha’s original novel

of Poirot’s demise, you will see that in it, he

has lost a considerable amount of weight,

not just from his body but also from his face,

and I wanted to show that to the audience. I

needed time to lose a little weight from my

face myself, and – even more important – to

adjust to the idea that I was saying my final

goodbye to him. That meant that I wanted

to film Curtain first, and then leave a gap

between that shoot and the filming of the

final four, more conventional, stories, so that

I could recover the weight. That would also

give me a chance to recover my emotional

equilibrium after the pain of losing him.

I was delighted when ITV agreed. They

accepted that we could film Curtain in

October and November 2012, and then go on

to finish the other four stories after a break,

between January and June 2013. And so it

was that, in September 2012, I went for my

final costume-fitting for Poirot, first for his

clothes for his final Curtain, and then for the

four films that were to follow.

My dresser helped me into the clothes I

would be wearing for my final scenes. I had

been living and breathing with Poirot for a

quarter of a century, and I now realised that

our relationship was actually coming to an

end. It was bound to have an effect on me,

because I had already decided that I would

never make a film which was not based on

Dame Agatha’s work. I had no wish to play

the part in Poirot films that were not based

on her stories.

When I arrived at Shirburn Castle near

Wallingford in Oxfordshire for the first day of

shooting, driven there by Sean, it was an

extraordinary,

almost

out-of-body,

experience. The crew treated me with kid

gloves, though they were almost as much in

mourning for Poirot as I was. But we were in

good hands. ITV had suggested that Hettie

Macdonald, who had worked with me on The

Mystery of the Blue Train back at Shepperton

in the summer of 2005, might direct Curtain,

and I was delighted with the choice. I

thought she had exactly the right sort of

empathy for this delicate but strong story,

which sees Poirot confront one of the most

evil, and audacious, murderers in his career.

The original novel was, almost certainly,

written in 1940, when Dame Agatha had

become truly fed up with her most famous

detective, but her publishers had insisted she

continue to write about him because he was

so popular. By 1975, however, just a year

before her death, they accepted that she

was no longer capable of completing another

novel, and agreed that it was time for

Curtain to see the light of day. It was

published just a few months before her

death in January 1976, as if the fictional

detective and his creator could not really live

without one another.

It was an instant bestseller on both sides

of the Atlantic, with the first hardback edition

selling 120,000 copies, and the American

paperback rights selling for $1 million. In the

Observer, Dame Agatha’s long-time admirer,

but also stern critic, Maurice Richardson,

described it as, ‘One of her most highly

contrived jobs, artificial as a mechanical

birdcage, but an unputdownable swansong.’

T h e Guardian’s critic, Matthew Coady,

nominated it as his ‘Book of the Year’,

saying, ‘No crime story . . . has given me

more undiluted pleasure,’ and adding, paying

another tribute to Dame Agatha, ‘As a critic,

I welcome it, as a reminder that sheer

ingenuity can still amaze.’

To be honest, it may not have been her

finest Poirot story, but it was certainly her

most deeply felt. and the whole world

seemed to be affected. No other fictional

detective, for example has ever been

honoured with a report of his death on the

front page of the New York Times, written as

an obituary, without the slightest sign of its

tongue in its cheek, concluding: ‘“Nothing in

his life became him quite like the leaving of

it,” to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot

frequently misquoted.’

In Curtain, Hastings goes to visit Poirot in