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From: New York Now | Theater | Thursday, December 16, 1999

Hercule-an Actor on B'way

By PATRICIA O'HAIRE 
Daily News Staff Writer

You hardly recognize David Suchet when he walks into a room. The man who portrays Hercule Poirot on the hit cable series doesn't have Poirot's mustache and hat or Poirot's Belgian accent, isn't heavy and isn't formally dressed.

"Everybody seems surprised when they see me," the British actor says with a smile, "but I keep getting stopped on the street here in New York by people who recognize me. I don't know how they do it, but they do."

Suchet, 53, had better be ready to be stopped even more often. He's making his Broadway debut starring in the revival of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," which opened last night, 19 years after it first appeared on Broadway and 15 years after the Academy Award-winning movie version.

He plays Antonio Salieri, the composer who, in a fit of jealousy, may or may not have murdered the brilliant but undisciplined Mozart, played by Michael Sheen.

The truth of the matter did he or didn't he? probably could be unearthed only by someone like Poirot, the cunning detective dreamed up by writer Agatha Christie.

Suchet's roles as Poirot and Salieri are just the latest in a long, productive career. In the past year, he has played studio head Louis B. Mayer in the HBO movie "RKO 281," about Orson Welles and the making of "Citizen Kane," and Napoleon in a Spanish-made English language comedy, "Sabotage."

"I was in my first play 30 years ago," Suchet says. "It was 'Under Milk Wood' at the Gateway Theater in Cheshire, England. I did a play there every two weeks for a year potboilers, comedies, tragedies. I once even played Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice,' with a huge beard, at the age of 23 the youngest Shylock in England's history.

"I had studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, but I really cut my teeth at Cheshire. There are no places like that anymore for actors to learn. Now they come along and they get leading roles right away. You can only learn to act like a child learns to walk step by step."

Suchet says his original plan was to follow in his surgeon father's footsteps, but that was shot down when he couldn't pass advanced physics. His father objected mildly to his desire to act, "but when I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982, I became respectable." Suchet's children aren't following in his footsteps, either. His son wants to be a Royal Marine, his daughter hasn't quite decided yet. But they and his wife are coming here for the holidays and, of course, for the show's opening. 

But Suchet always will be grateful to Poirot, because it gave him, he says, "the opportunity at the ripe old age of 42 to suddenly be asked to do great big zonking roles in London's West End theaters.

"I'd done some before, but never did I get inquiries like I did after 'Poirot' was shown," Suchet says. "I look up every day and say 'Thank you!' Suddenly, all those years of theater training came into its own, because I was not a young superstar. I was an actor with miles on the clock as far as theater was concerned.

"Fortunately, 'Poirot' still has a life," he says with a smile. "There are 24 more stories we haven't got around to yet!"

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