Poirot and Me (3 page)

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