David Suchet is so famous these days that people can pick him out from the crowd with almost nothing to go on. “I was filming in Newfoundland 18 months ago for Canadian TV,” he recalls, amused. “And while I was having a coffee, someone came up behind me. All I heard was, 'I’d know the back of that head anywhere!’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Just two words explain all: Hercule Poirot. Since Suchet took on the role of Agatha Christie’s intensely alert, hyper-sensitive, trimly moustached Belgian detective for ITV in 1989, he has not only made it his own so far as British audiences are concerned – he has gone global. It’s estimated, he’s reliably informed, that between 600-700 million people worldwide follow his adventures. Someone somewhere is watching the show right now.
Suchet doesn’t tell me all this in a starry, status-conscious way. Authoritative and richly mellifluous of speech after 41 years in the business, he’s still affable and avuncular. Those brown eyes, so keenly penetrating on stage and screen, signal kindness behind donnish spectacles.
He makes it a point of principle, he insists, to be as approachable as he can be. Ever since, as a young, nervous, autograph-hunter, he was given a foul-mouthed brush-off by a famous comedian, whom he politely declines to name and shame, he has been wary of getting too grand.
“To this day, whenever I come out of a stage door and there are people waiting, I will always look out for the shaking hand. I will never be rude to any fan who comes up to me or to people who stare at me. They’re my audience. Besides, no one ever says anything nasty to me, and most people generally have the courtesy to address me as Mr Suchet. They don’t say, 'Are you the one who plays Poirot?’”
Given the lengthy exposure he has enjoyed in the role – there now remain only six more stories to go before he will have recorded the complete works – it’s remarkable he has been able to play so many other parts without being scuppered by the super-sleuth.
As he takes to the West End stage this month in a fresh revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), in which he stars as the haunted family man and factory boss Joe Keller, he’s adding to a dense, diverse list of credits that includes, in the theatre, Salieri in Amadeus, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the predatory professor John in Oleanna. On TV, he has won praise as Augustus Melmotte in the BBC adaptation of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and an Emmy for his portrayal of Robert Maxwell.
He turns the observation on its head: it’s no surprise that he has managed to do all this other high-profile work, he maintains. Rather, were it not for the other jobs, he doubts he’d have stayed the course with Poirot. “All those other parts mean I can go back to Poirot each time feeling completely refreshed.” He denies recent reports that there are imminent plans afoot to bring Poirot to the stage. “I’m not going to put it completely out of court, but I won’t say yes or no just yet.”
All My Sons was last seen in London at the National 10 years ago, with the late James Hazeldine taking the role of Keller, whose affluent security is founded on misdeeds for which he has never taken the rap – a batch of shoddy cylinder heads, too hastily dispatched during the war, resulted in the death of 21 airmen, and the incarceration of a colleague.
Suchet had no hesitation in signing up for Howard Davies’s return visit to the play and that production. While Keller fits with a pattern of compromised, culpable figures in his CV, Suchet refuses to reduce him to a simplistic emblem of shabby capitalism. “You can’t play him as malicious. I see him as a simple, blinkered Midwest man whose world view is dictated by survival and family. He just doesn’t see the bigger picture – how what happens between one person and another can affect wider society.”
There’s a particular personal interest for him in the play’s subject-matter. “The big thing that hit me when I read it and saw it recently in New York was that my son, Robert, was in the Royal Marines in Afghanistan. You can’t read or perform a play like this, about a son who died in service, and not relate it in some way to what happens inside yourself as a parent.
“There were two times when we thought we might have lost him, and I will never forget watching the 10 o’clock news and waiting to find out. You can’t help it; you start preparing to mourn.”
And were those feelings tied into an anxiety about the quality of the equipment British troops had at their disposal? He adopts a guarded line: “It’s very easy to point fingers and jump to hasty conclusions. You have to be very careful to establish the facts. But, if it’s eventually proved that equipment hasn’t been up to scratch, then you will think, 'What have we been doing to these men and women?’”
In the end, whatever the personal connections, he ensures the parts are never “about” him. His working life has been dedicated to the idea that it’s what the writer wanted that counts.
“My earliest definition of acting was that you should react as truthfully as possible within the circumstances laid down by the playwright – with the help of the director. That’s it: I want to 'get’ the character. One of the highlights of my career was when Tom Sharpe rang me up after Blott on the Landscape was broadcast and said, 'I’m not going to talk to you for long, but I’ve seen what I’ve written – thank you’ and then he put the phone down. I have carried that with me for years.”
- 'All My Sons’ runs at the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue from May 19.