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The way I act now

From Inspector Poirot to Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, David Suchet becomes one with his characters. He tells Emma Brockes how Robert Maxwell was his rogue role model

Wednesday November 14, 2001
The Guardian

In the second between being stopped in the street and being asked for his autograph, David Suchet allows a faint hope to prosper: that the celebrity-spotter's "are you...?" concludes otherwise than, "the bloke who plays Inspector Poirot?" Of course, he is usually disappointed he says. "But I'm occasionally surprised when someone stops me and says, 'I'll never forget your Sigmund Freud.' Or, as happened last week, 'Oh, I saw you in Murder in Mind, you
were wonderful, have you ever played a homosexual before?' I get caught out by that. You see them coming and you immediately think it's going to be about Poirot. And I get surprised and very pleased when it's not."On Sunday night, the 55-year-old appeared in the role he hopes will unseat his association with the skittle-shaped Belgian detective. He was Augustus Melmotte,
the villain of Andrew Davies' BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope's novel The Way We Live Now. Suchet wasn't the main focus of the first episode, but the reviews still seized on his portrayal of the vulgar plutocrat. He folds himself into the part with total conviction - divests himself of charm and becomes a stoop-shouldered, swivel-eyed maniac. It is a rendition, he hopes, that will promote the character of Melmotte to a notoriety equalling Dickens' finest. "It was one of the most alien characters I have played," he says. "He bore absolutely no relationship to me at all."

This is apparent from the off: Suchet is scrupulously polite and  friendly. He says he still rises from his chair at dinner when his wife enters a room. He never got bored playing Poirot, he says, because not only was the character good fun, but a man of "good values, very good values". But he no longer looks like Poirot. There is no moustache; he does not walk like Charlie Chaplin, or, as Agatha Christie put it in an early Poirot mystery, with a "rapid, mincing gait,
his feet tightly and painfully enclosed in his black patent leather boots." He is not the shape of a beach ball either, but is quite tall and elegant. Suchet's paternal grandfather was a Russian called Suchedowitz; there is French blood on his mother's side. He knows what it is to be an outsider, useful for playing Melmotte. "Money, money, money, passion, power, politics," he says, summarising Trollope. "When The Way We Live Now first came out, it wasn't well received. But over time it has become one of the great novels of that period."

The prospect of playing Melmotte appalled him. "You read about this larger than life figure, and the actor trembles a bit because you think, 'How can I be larger than life?' You look at the modern equivalents - Robert Maxwell, Jeffrey Archer, these great rogues of the age - and they are larger than life. Captain Bob was the prime example and I did use him for research, try to get into his mind."

Suchet read all the Maxwell biographies and watched all the TV footage. It was a radio interview that gave him his sharpest insight. "The question was put to him that he was gun-running for the Israelis. There was a long pause, and he said, 'I beg your pardon? Would you mind saying that again?' and suddenly his guard was down, and you heard what you might have heard in a boardroom. Brilliant questioning. Maxwell's life mirrored Melmotte's almost to his death. But I hope they don't say, oh, David Suchet tried to become Robert Maxwell. That was not the intention at all; it was a way into the mindset of that type of... rogue, really."

Suchet is a methodical actor. He is not, he admits with modesty, "totally, naturally instinctive" about acting. When he started out as a young man at the RSC, he used to make lists. "I'm not gifted in the sense that I can immediately see what's on the page and perform. I can't do that. There are many who can - or profess to. I can't. I wish to study the script, the language of the character, how he speaks, what lengths of sentences he uses, is he very loquacious? That sort of thing. It makes me feel safer, because it's a pad from which to launch myself. The most important thing it does is stimulate my imagination. It forces me to think on and around the character. If I get stuck with a character, I will still use little tricks like pretend I'm writing a letter to them."

This can get him into trouble when he tries applying it to roles that won't stand up to scrutiny. Suchet attempted to bring depth to the role of Nagi Hassan in Executive Decision, a Hollywood action flick he made in 1996. The director wasn't impressed. "Hang on, buddy," he was told, "we just want you to be an Arab baddy." But Suchet couldn't help it. He has an obsessive personality. At 50, he took up the clarinet and studied it to grade five. His current obsession is the canals of Great Britain. "It's a wonderful network," he says. "I've got big maps all over the place. I love it."

He has gone a long way to compensate for his early timidity. Suchet's background hardly prepared him for life as an actor. "I was the son of a successful Harley Street surgeon, into boarding school from eight until 13, then public school, then a short gap out, then what? Then choosing acting, which was not the natural choice. I had to fight my background a bit, because it was one of safety and
security and I knew acting was not going to be that. For several years I found myself inhibited, I couldn't really jump out of the plane without a parachute."

There are still two things Suchet would like achieve: success in film, and more comedy. "I've never been a romantic lead. My route would follow more the Anthony Hopkins character route; he had that wonderful break in Silence of the Lambs. I suppose we all look to that break and think that one day maybe it will happen to
me. I'm ready for that now. I need something like The Full Monty, just a little next foot up. I feel that I'm right on that diving board, bouncing, and it just needs the smallest thing. I look forward to that moment."

With Suchet, however, modesty always prevails. "You can't build your life, hoping and waiting," he says. "I'm very happy as I am."

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