Free Poirot and Me by David Suchet, Geoffrey Wansell Page A

the
    kidnap must have been organised by
    someone who knew the family, and
    eventually retrieves young Johnnie.
    The bond that was beginning to develop
    between Hugh, Philip and me seemed to
    grow as the weeks passed, and it was
    certainly clear for all to see at the start of
    the third film, Murder in the Mews, which
    opened with the three characters walking
    home after dinner past a November
    fireworks party and the mews where
    Hastings garages his Lagonda.
    I also seemed to develop a rapport with
    the rest of the cast. David Yelland was one
    of the guest stars of Murder in the Mews.
    He’d played the Prince of Wales in the Oscar-
    winning film Chariots of Fire. Educated at
    Cambridge, where he read English, and only
    a year younger than I am, he was wonderful
    as the ambitious MP Charles Laverton-West.
    No sooner had we finished Mews than we
    were on to the next, Four and Twenty
    Blackbirds. There was hardly a moment for
    me to do anything except go to Twickenham
    and work. That meant that I had to leave
    home every morning at 6.30 a.m. and I often
    didn’t get back to Pinner until 8.30 or 9 p.m.
    I’m afraid that meant that Sheila and the
    children did not see a great deal of me in the
    months between July and Christmas 1988,
    because even when I did get home, I had to
    look at the script for the next day. I
    eventually got into the habit of making sure
    that I learnt my lines at least two weeks
    ahead, to overcome the panic of trying to
    learn them the night before.
    One difficulty for me was that Poirot
    always had to explain exactly who did it – at
    the end of the story – to whichever group of
    people had been involved, including, of
    course, Hastings and Japp. So I found myself
    often having to learn quite long speeches
    after I’d finished filming for the day. I tried to
    prepare for them by making sure I looked at
    them throughout the filming, but, inevitably,
    when it came down to making sure I had
    them firmly in my mind, everything hinged
    on the night before we were due to shoot.
    The denouement was the moment when I
    revealed
    the
    murderer
    to
    everyone,
    including, most important of all, the
    audience. I simply could not allow myself to
    get it even a fraction wrong; that would have
    been to let Poirot down, and I would never
    allow myself to do that.
    There was another issue about the
    denouements, however, which involved
    being true to Poirot and to myself as an
    actor.
    When Dame Agatha wrote those final
    scenes where the villain is revealed, she was
    allowing Poirot his ‘theatrical’ moment. He is
    well aware of who is guilty as he goes round
    the room explaining the nature of the case,
    but Dame Agatha and he often take great
    pleasure in picking on an innocent party and
    seeming to accuse them of the crime, before
    revealing their innocence. It was her way of
    building up suspense for the final ‘reveal’.
    In those scenes, Poirot is acting – teasing
    the characters, apparently accusing them
    and then changing his mind, making them an
    essential part of the final drama – and in
    that sense, he is treading on my territory as
    an actor.
    Now, because I am an actor, I know
    precisely how to play those scenes, for they
    allow me to use my theatricality. I feel
    instinctively what I need to do, and how to
    do it. No one needs to direct me in those
    denouements because Poirot has strayed
    into my world as an actor, which means that
    – in a strange way – I feel more comfortable
    doing those scenes than almost any other.
    In fact, it is in those scenes that Poirot and
    I completely merge, touching one another in
    a quite extraordinary way. There is the actor
    in Poirot which merges almost seamlessly
    into me the actor; the perfectionist in Poirot
    and the same perfectionist in me; the need
    for order in Poirot precisely matched by my
    own need for order, not least in the filming
    of his stories.
    We are all but one person, so much so
    that I often feel the line between us blurring.
    If he