Printed in The Knowledge, April 28 - May 4, 2007 
"David Suchet tells Ian Johns why playing the disgraced media mogul Robert Maxwell offered a larger-than-life challenge"
Preparing for a role, David Suchet has been known to go shopping or eat out in character. For the fastidious Hercule Poirot, the part that made him a household name, he might come home with foie gras from Fortnum & Mason or a finicky attitude to washing the dishes. So I was a little anxious when meeting him to discuss his latest role as Robert Maxwell in Maxwell, a BBC Two drama about the tycoon’s final months trying to avoid financial ruin before falling from his yacht off the Canary Islands in 1991. Was I in for a bruising encounter of the bullying and bonhomie with which Maxwell had run his empire? “Don’t worry,” says Suchet, polite and amiable throughout. “Nowadays I only take a character out shopping in my imagination.”
Known for his meticulous research – for the BBC serial Freud (1984) he studied with Freudian Analytical Society in Vienna – Suchet was ahead of the game with Maxwell. He had already researched the media mogul for his Bafta-winning performance as Auguste Melmotte, the corrupt financier memorably played as a Hannibal Lecter of social gracelessness, In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (2001). “Like Maxwell, Melmotte was a robber baron of industry, so I read all the Maxwell biographies and even got to meet his widow, Betty,” Suchet explains. “I learnt that he could leave a room all hale and hearty and re-enter a minute later like a raging bear. He was a man of emotional extremes, always on the go to avoid boredom. I don’t think he’d have found himself easy to live with, otherwise.”
The script for Maxwell by Craig Warner, who wrote the Princess Margaret drama, The Queen’s Sister for Channel 4, mixes real and composite characters in what Suchet describes as “a fictional drama based on fact.” It conflates events from Maxwell’s last 18 months as he plunders the coffers of his companies, including the Mirror Group Newspapers pension funds, while his debts, weight and irrational behaviour balloon. While the extent of Maxwell’s empire, political connections and aftermath of his actions remain as sketchy in the film as its portrayal of his relationships with his wife (Patricia Hodge), son Kevin (Ben Caplan) and secretary (Daniella Denby-Ashe), Suchet’s Maxwell is a vivid creation of domineering hubris.
Suchet also drew on Maxwell for his 2005 West End performance as the businessman Gregor Antonescu in Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy. “Antonescu was from Eastern Europe and willing to do anything to avoid ruin. Maxwell had arrived in Britain without speaking a word of English from this poor Jewish background in Czechoslovakia that he likened to the worst poverty in Dickensian London. He could charm, but you don’t become a mogul from nothing by being Mr. Nice Guy.”
A Maxwell employee once said he was the sincerest liar she had ever met. “That’s exactly right,” Suchet says. “When you see him in TV footage there is not a flicker of self-doubt. He was a colourful self-publicist, even appearing in his own adverts for Mirror bingo. In his chat-show appearances, he’d applaud himself for making the audience laugh. But a big key for me was his voice. There’s a radio interview when he was thrown by allegations of him gun-running for the Israelis and suddenly his guard was down and you heard what he might have been like in a boardroom rather than in public.
“My own voice is naturally deep but for Maxwell I had to go right down while adopting his studied RP inflections. Those vibrations do things to you physically.” He gives a burst of his Maxwell burr and suddenly his whole body bulks up before my eyes. “I’m 5ft 8in and about 12½st and Maxwell was 6ft 3in and 22st, so if I’d padded up I’d have looked ridiculous,” he says. “I hope I’ve achieved his physicality mostly through manner and posture.”
Suchet is keen to stress that research is only a preparatory tool. “My craft is to become a character, not bend the character to my personality. Research helps, but then you have to let go of it and play the character as it appears in the script.” Yet he admits that he has had to learn to let go of each role. In 1991, a psychiatrist friend came backstage after seeing him as Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s suicidal hero. “He said I was losing myself, then asked me to tell him my address, children’s ages and so forth. I couldn’t. He subsequently taught me how to deprogramme my mind and remind myself who I was. Now I can do it in a matter of seconds.”
The middle son of a Harley Street gynaecologist, Suchet embraced acting at 16 with the National Youth Theatre, and went on to be a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s and 1980s. He’s clearly drawn to larger-than-life characters that one can both like and dislike, whether it’s George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1996) and the jealous Salieri destroying Mozart in Amadeus (1998), or the handyman in Tom Sharpe’s Blott on the Landscape (1985), the corpulent Edwardian spy in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1992) and the intense DI John Borne in NCS Manhunt (2002).
The 60-year-old actor concedes that he has an obsessive streak. He took up the clarinet at 50 and studied to grade five. He currently has a passion for Britain’s canals and lives by the river in East London with his actress wife, Sheila Ferris, and their two children. Although brought up as a non-Orthodox Jew, he was baptised a Christian in the mid-1980s, discovering his faith in the same way that he finds a character – through detailed research.
So does he look for good and evil and some redeemable quality in the characters that he plays? “I think there’s a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, a light and dark side, public and private. As an actor, you have to find some point of sympathy, otherwise you end up commentating on a character rather than playing it.” And Maxwell? “However awful he was, he was an entertainingly colourful figure with extreme emotions. I don’t think that he was always in control of himself.”
Warner’s script ends with Maxwell waiting to be flown to his yacht and so avoids addressing the riddle of his death. Was his fatal fall a suicide or caused by a heart attack? “It’s not for me to say,” Suchet says. “There are all sorts of conspiracy theories as well, including his supposed connection with the Israeli secret service. Such questions would have swamped the rest of the story.”
Suchet is back on stage next month as a cardinal in a new play, The Last Confession, at the Chichester Festival Theatre, which speculates on whether Pope John Paul I was poisoned amid dodgy Vatican bank dealings and fears that he might be too reformist. Suchet then hopes to film more Poirot. But having played Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective since 1989 in some 70 episodes is there anything new he can find in the role?
“Only in the way he reacts to new situations,” Suchet admits. “But he’s still such fun to play. If we shoot four more this year, that leaves eight Poirot stories left. I’d be so thrilled and proud to leave that complete canon of work behind.”
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