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Devon Life Online

Ah! the Little Grey Cells!

For a fictional character to be recognised as the greatest detective in the world is a tribute to the skill of Agatha Christie... and the man who plays him.

it has probably been said before, but it bears repeating: David Suchet is a gentleman through and through and an interviewer s dream. Had I spoken to him 30 minutes later, however, it would have been Hercule Poirot who replied, another gentleman but one from a totally different era. By then, the moustache would have gone on, the character would have kicked in and Poirot would have been in full spate. Once he is in full costume David Suchet recedes into the background and Poirot takes over. It is something over which David has no choice, he says. When you are filming, you can t just drop in and out of character, especially someone so extreme as Poirot. I have to be bang on for that character just as soon as the director shouts action . When the moustache goes on, Suchet dons Poirot like a comfortable coat.

As it was, it was lunchtime and a bare-lipped David was taking a break from filming Evil Under the Sun (the latest in his Agatha Christie s Poirot series) on Burgh Island, Bigbury-on-Sea, South Devon. It was raining: a true British summer and not at all like the weather portrayed in the novel, although the previous day had been glorious. So far we have been very fortunate, David told me. I think it is going to film very, very well. Since Burgh Island (Smuggler s Island of the novel) and the Burgh Island Hotel (The Jolly Roger Hotel although called The Sandy Cove Hotel in the film) is where the action in the book is located, and where it was written, it certainly deserves to film well. It is not often that a screenplay can be located so accurately in its setting.

I had been to Burgh Island before, about two or three years ago, and had often wondered whether, if we did do Evil Under the Sun in the series, we would be coming back to film it. But then, I never think these stories are ever going to happen, really. We are never contracted for more than we are doing at the time. That is a fact of life in the industry, apparently, although how any TV company can possibly think of not continuing a series so phenomenally successful as Agatha Christie s Poirot is beyond me. Suchet has produced the definitive Poirot, despite any protestations of his to the contrary as he explained how his character came to fruition.

You can t set out to become the definitive that is purely other people s judgement. When I was asked to do Poirot and I hadn t read much Christie at the time I went back to the books to find out about the man before I said yes to the role. Having read a little, I knew this was someone I would really like to play and a role I would love to be challenged by. Then, having committed myself to the first of a three-year option, I went through nearly every book and story that she wrote about Poirot, with a big file next to me writing down all the characteristics I could discover. It soon became clear to me that this was somebody we had never seen on screen before. We had seen some wonderful actors portray the character, but we had seen wonderful actors rather than the character himself. This is no criticism, but a fact. So, when I discovered him, it was almost like unearthing a pot of gold because here was the character that Christie had written in all his depth and eccentricity and not just in two dimensions. Here was a really interesting character who, at first, you think would make you run a mile from him because of his pomposity and egocentricity and his vanity. The next minute you want to stay with him because he is just warm, twinkly, friendly... you never know where you are with him, but you are never going to be bored.

Now, I don t know about you, but that sounds pretty much definitive to me, and David s passion for this eccentric little Belgian is overwhelming. Yet the role might not have been, had it not been for Tom Sharpe and Agatha Christie s daughter, Rosalind Hicks. It was Suchet s performance as the quietly scheming and manically obsessed Blott in Sharpe s Blott on the Landscape in 1985 that determined Rosalind to turn to her husband and her son, Mathew Prichard, and say that it was quite clear that here was the next Poirot and that the Christie machine would not do a Poirot TV adaptation without him. It was a moment that started 12 years of playing the world s most famous Belgian on screen, to date. My greatest moment in playing the character was when Rosalind Hicks told me that her mother would have been thrilled to bits, David said.

What intrigues David most about the Poirot stories is that they are not whodunnits , they are more what he labels howdunnits because the reader, or viewer, is following Poirot s mind all the way through. They may, in fact, know who did it quite early on (as Poirot does in Evil Under the Sun) but it is how it was done, as revealed in the summing up, that is the draw: how the little clues add up, how they string together, how they all gel in his mind facts, Hastings, facts that make Poirot the greatest detective in the world. It is why he keeps on talking about his little grey cells and the accent slipped out.

With 23 more stories remaining, TV companies willing, David has another 12 years or so to go in the role at the present rate of filming, and it is his greatest wish to see the entire Poirot canon on film. What a wonderful thing to be able to leave behind me: the complete works God give me life to play it, David said. And Poirot is timeless. People will be able to watch him in a hundred or a hundred- and-fifty years time. In the final Poirot novel, Curtain, Poirot dies, now an old man. David shuddered. Don t come near me after that one, he said, because I will be very emotional! So revered was Christie s Poirot of the day that, when Curtain was published in 1975 (although written during the war years), his death made front-page news in The Times and the New York Times. So rare an experience, it makes you realise just how popular this man was, David said.

David Suchet has played many roles in his life, on TV, in films and theatre he has just come back from a successful 8 months run on Broadway with Amadeus and has had many highlights in his life, but ask him what the greatest present of all was and he will tell you unequivocally. It was being asked to play Hercule Poirot.

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