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Suchet on his role as the media tycoon Robert Maxwell…
Inside the mind of a media monster
by Jane Dudley, Yorkshire Post 27th April 2007
“Robert Maxwell fooled and bullied people he worked with and finally ruined the lives of many by wrecking their pensions. Jane Dudley talks to David Suchet, who plays the crooked media tycoon in a new drama”
Craig Warner's drama about Robert Maxwell begins just as the tycoon's business and personal worlds are imploding – multi-billion-pound business empire on the rocks, marriage in difficulties, rival Rupert Murdoch sprinting ahead, leaving an ever-fatter Maxwell in his wake.
The flotation of The Daily Mirror doesn't raise enough cash to get him out of the hole, his secretary tells him to get lost when he tries it on with her, and his finance chief tries to quit. So Maxwell retreats to the heart of his web, at the offices of The Daily Mirror, and sets about saving his skin. His attempts to stem the tide of debts culminate in him stealing millions from his companies and their pension funds.
David Suchet is famously painstaking in his preparation for portraying a character. He read every one of Agatha Christie's Poirot books (over 70) when he took on the role of the famous detective in 1987.
"It's my duty to do my research. It's no more than my job," says Suchet. "The story brings together the events of the last 18 months of Maxwell's life, starting just before the flotation of the Mirror. I would say Maxwell had a brilliant business head and I don't think there's any doubt that he was an extraordinary businessman, liked or disliked. He was very powerful, very bullish, very brutish and he got his own way, as a lot of present-day businessmen do.
"I think, and I'm not alone here, that when Maxwell left our world, there was a certain sense of loss of a huge, colourful figure in our society. For good or ill, that's what he was.
"I think what's great about the script, and why I was drawn to it, is that it doesn't just present him as the big bully and evil, thieving man that he's probably made out to be now because he stole the pension funds for himself and such like. This drama doesn't do that. That's there and one judges it according to how you feel about that, but then his other life is there as well. I think there's a very good mix of sensitivity and bullishness and what was later found out to be criminal activity."
Suchet's research revealed that, while people immediately think of the pension fund fraud when they think of Maxwell, he'd actually "borrowed" money before. "It wasn't the first time he'd actually taken money and it was never his intention not to repay it. His intention was to take it to get him out of a spot, having tried lots of other ways to get money, because he knew what was happening. Who knows, if he had not died and managed to find a way to pay the money back, then nobody would ever have known, as I think was the case on two occasions that he did it before. But he was always intending to pay it back.
"What he did, famously, was get a loan from a bank, then get a loan from another bank and use that loan to pay off the first one, then he went to another bank – he was always paying off the loans, but he was in credit and keeping afloat. I believe, but I don't know, that a lot of people do that. I couldn't live like that, but people do and don't lose any sleep over it.
"There's a lovely line in the drama: 'We just have to figure out what we do when we run out of banks'."
David Suchet was already knowledgeable about Maxwell's life, as he researched him when he played the character Augustus Melmotte in Andrew Davies's adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now five years ago. "I did, in fact, meet Betty (Maxwell's wife] when I was researching Melmotte. She was absolutely charming and very supportive.
"I used the characteristics of Maxwell as my basis for Melmotte. It was almost a carbon copy of Maxwell's background, although obviously he was a different person, and I also used him for Gregor Antonescu, whom I played in the West End of London in Terence Rattigan's play, Man And Boy. He was an Eastern European from Budapest, a businessman who, again, crashed. He had the same sort of background, the same sort of bullish attitude and ways. He had very much a Maxwell base, because Maxwell came from Czechoslovakia and came over here without speaking a word of English."
David Suchet did not aim to look like Maxwell. "I knew about the man, I knew about his history and I knew about his business dealings because of all my other research. What you may say is, 'Oh, gosh, isn't that like Maxwell', but it won't be a complete carbon-copy impersonation. It can't be because I'm five foot eight and 12˝ stone and he was six foot three and 22 stone, but that doesn't really matter.
"One hopefully gets the power, the magnetism, the charisma of him and what I really studied most of all was his voice. I got hold of every single interview that he'd ever done on radio and about four in-vision interviews – such as The Brian Walden Show, Terry Wogan, This Is Your Life – and really concentrated on his rhythm of language and his pitch.
"You won't mistake that it's him. What I like to try to do when playing a real person is to get a look that is acceptable. We tried to get Maxwell's hairline right and obviously his eyebrows we tried to get right because they used to fold over and they were a characteristic of his, so they will be there."
Maxwell isn't the first "real" person David Suchet has played. "I played Sigmund Freud and Edward Keller, the scientist – I've played a lot of real people. I'm too old now but I would have loved to have played Napoleon. A fascinating man, again, who was the first person that we know in recent history to have killed prisoners in cold blood, because he kept the food for his troops, which would have been considered now to have been an act of war.
"When I'm playing real people, you have to approach it from a whole different point of view. I have a greater responsibility. I don't necessarily find it harder, I just find the responsibility greater, to get aspects of their character right in the sense that you will recognise who I'm playing, and to be as truthful as I possibly can to that."
And Poirot? "He was a creation of Agatha Christie and, in a sense, was so popular and real for the readership. I was with Peter Ustinov in the film, playing Inspector Japp (in the 1985 movie Thirteen At Dinner], and I realised when I started reading the books there had not been on the screen the character that she'd actually written. I then thought I was very lucky to have this opportunity to create what nobody had created before, and that was my research. I really went into the books and had a file, a dossier, on everything – his walk, where he produced his sound from, how he spoke and everything like that – the same as I did with Maxwell."
Some 20 years later, Suchet has only 12 more Poirots to shoot before finishing the complete works. "There's talk of more Poirot, which is very exciting. And if that happens, I will be delighted. We'll do four, which will mean only eight more to go after that. If God gives me life and Granada the money, we shall do it," he laughs.
"It's just been glorious and I don't tire of playing that little man. I just love him and what's so lucky for me is that it doesn't stop me doing other work."
It's this variety of roles that Suchet still craves as an actor of 37 years and he considers himself an extraordinarily lucky man: "I've always said – and I'm really not boasting here, I wouldn't dream of boasting – if ever I have four scripts on the table, for radio, film, television and theatre, I would consider myself very lucky."
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/features?articleid=2738631
2007 © All rights reserved
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