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Feb. 10, 2000

Suchet's Hercule Poirot returns as good as ever in A&E movie

TV FEATURE
By ANN HODGES
Houston Chronicle TV Critic

It's been five years since Agatha Christie's most popular detective exercised his "little gray cells" on a good whodunit yarn. At 7 p.m. Sunday, Hercule Poirot gets back to business. A&E brings him out of retirement to solve Christie's famous case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's the first of two new Poirot movies, and both A&E and David Suchet hope there'll be more. Suchet said he actually had trouble getting back into the walk and the talk. But, in Roger Ackroyd, Suchet's still got it -- the consummate Poirot. Even though this case is not one of his all-time teasers, it's great to have him back. It's also great to see him reunited with his perfect partner-in-detection, Philip Jackson's Chief Inspector Japp. Faithful Poirot fans are bound to miss Hugh Fraser's Captain Hastings, his slightly muddle-headed friend and associate. He's off running a ranch in South America. Pauline Moran's Miss Lemon, Poirot's splendid secretary, isn't there, either. Poirot has closed his London office and retired to the picture pretty village of Kings Abbott. He is happily tending his garden when his old friend Roger Ackroyd is murdered, right down the road, and a curious journal becomes the clue to nail the guilty party from a cast of prime suspects. 

When Christie wrote her first Poirot story in 1920, she learned her lesson about consulting experts to get things right. She ended that novel with a courtroom scene so filled with inaccuracies that the publishers called for a rewrite, according to author Ron Miller's definitive book on TV's longest-running whodunit series, Mystery! A Celebration.

PBS' Mystery! introduced Poirot to American TV in 1990, and it was an immediate hit. The casting of Suchet was its stroke of genius. He is superb, and he now owns the part. Thank Christie's daughter, Rosalind Hicks, for that. She spotted Suchet on English TV in 1986, starring in Blott on the Landscape. He played an eccentric handyman who wore a beret and a fancy mustache, and the minute she saw him, Hicks knew he'd be the perfect Poirot.

It's hard even to imagine anyone else now, though some of England's top actors played him in movies -- Charles Laughton, Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and Ian Holm, to name a few. Christie never saw Suchet's Poirot. She died in 1976. But she never liked any of the film Poirots she did see, and when Suchet took the role, his first thought was to please Christie. He took time out from his current Broadway performance as the back-stabbing Salieri of Amadeus to tell the TV critics that tale via satellite from New York.

"I had only known Poirot from the films," he recalled. "I was in a very early Poirot, Thirteen at Dinner, with Peter Ustinov in the role. Little did I know then I would be playing him."

He knew how popular Poirot was with Christie fans. "To such an extent," Suchet reminds, "that when he finally died, in a book called Curtain, his death was reported on the front page of the New York Times."

When he was asked to do the TV series, Suchet read the books for the first time. And there, he said, "I discovered this strangely eccentric little man I found both irritating and charming. Agatha Christie did not write just a two-dimensional eccentric clown. ... She writes him constantly, in her words, `with a certain twinkle.' His ego is huge, yet you like him for it."

He first found the voice and the Belgian accent. Then he added body padding to match Poirot's girth, and the mustache that was Poirot's pride and joy. For the walk, he went to Christie's own description, "A mincing gait with his feet tightly enclosed in patent leather boots." Finally, he got "the twinkle in the eyes." Without that, he said, Poirot could have been a pain.

Suchet has been acting since he was 17 and the star of his school production of Macbeth. He'd wanted to be a doctor, like his father, but when he failed physics, he joined the National Youth Theatre, and that was it. He's done it all -- stage and Royal Shakespeare Company, countless movies and a long list of TV credits.

And now, he has a dream. "It's one of my dearest wishes," he said, "to bring all the Poirot novels and short stories to the screen, ending with Curtain, in which the great man finally dies."

Well, there are still 25 of Christie's Poirot mysteries left untapped by TV or movies. Keep your fingers crossed, and those cards and e-mails coming for more.

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