The labour of being Hercule

by Lucy Cavendish on telegraph.co.uk March 2001

 

 

DAVID SUCHET'S favourite story is this: "I was on Broadway a year or so ago playing the part of Salieri in Amadeus. There I was as the curtain raised - Salieri, an old man with my face greyed and wrinkled. I stood there. Motionless. Quiet. Then I heard a loud woman in the front row saying to her friend, 'No, that's not him. He's not Poirot. You'll know him when you see him.' Then I come on in the next scene, now as young Salieri without the make-up. I hear this lady pipe up again. 'No, that's not him, that's definitely not him. He doesn't look a single bit like Poirot.' It was everything I could do not to laugh."

 

David Suchet loves this story. He tells it in a very actorly fashion, rolling his eyes and raising his arms above his head and waggling his seal-like head as if playing with a ball. For a man who comes across on screen and stage as being smooth and controlled, he is surprisingly voluble. He says he loved playing Salieri, loved it. And he loves the fact that no one ever recognises him. "It means that they've been caught up in the role rather than the actor . . . Hopefully it means I've done my job, put in a convincing performance. I hope I do because I don't just play a part, I inhabit it."

 

He has certainly inhabited one role - that of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. When Suchet talks about Poirot he gets very excited. All 5ft 9in of him bounces up and down on the sofa and his big, dark eyes stop looking so intense. He gives me a little smack on the arm in a playfully thespian fashion. "Oh, Hercule's a funny man, a quirky man, isn't he?" he says. "I really like him. Some people think I'm him but I'm not. I'm ordered and quite fastidious but I don't colour-code my socks. I just keep them neatly in a line in the drawer.

 

"He fascinates me because he has a very particular sexuality. He's not actually sexual at all, is he? Some people think he's gay, but no!" - Suchet shakes his head vehemently - "No, Poirot is definitely not gay. He is a typical bachelor of his time, the 1930s."

 

He is very possessive about Poirot - it is because of the Belgian detective that Suchet is famous the world over. "People really love it, the Japanese in particular. My wife and I went over there and were treated like royalty . . . Japan is populated by mini-Poirots."

 

Suchet was mortified when Granada ended its first Poirot series on grounds of cost. "I did not want Poirot to die. It was like a bereavement. I am sure Poirot will die eventually but if I can leave the legacy of the complete work behind me, then it would be wonderful."

Five years later, due to public demand, it came back, and a new Poirot series will be screened in June this year. “I don't necessarily find him that easy. It took me quite a lot of time to get back into his character. I get letters about his inconsistencies, but sometimes Poirot's character is inconsistent."

 

Suchet is slightly put out that there is to be a rival Hercule, with Alfred Molina playing a 21st-century Poirot in a film made for television. "He's going to have a mobile you can fax from and a computerised personal organiser and all that stuff and I just can't see it myself. I'm not saying that I don't think Alfred Molina isn't a good actor. I'm just a bit upset because it's a re-make of Murder On The Orient Express, and that means that I won't be able to do that one, because of some complication with the copyright. It's been my life's ambition to film every Poirot mystery and it'll ruin that."

 

Suchet could talk about Poirot non-stop. In fact David Suchet could talk about anything non-stop. He likes to tell stories, endless myriad, layered tales about everything that has happened to him over his past 54 years. At one point he tells me how, seven years ago, when he was in David Mamet's controversial play Oleanna, the cast would hold meet-the-audience sessions at the Royal Court Theatre on Saturday afternoons. "This very genteel older Chelsea lady came to meet us and she stood up and said [he mimics a graceful, high, upper-class female voice], 'I have spent all of my life doing the right thing and behaving as a moral and upstanding woman . . . and then, Mr Suchet, I came to see this play and at the end I wanted to stand up and shout, Kill the f-ing bitch!' And then she sat down and everyone burst out laughing."

 

Suchet finds the process of acting fascinating. "I have to inhabit the people I play. I have to get underneath their skin. I'm fascinated by them in the same way that I'm fascinated by people. What makes us tick?

"I bring characters home with me and I can't make them go away," he says. This has, in the past, been quite tormenting, at its worst when he was playing Freud in the eponymous television series in the early 1980s. "My wife Shelia [Ferris, a former actress; they have been married for 25 years] had a very hard time. I once heard her say to our son, 'Now if you don't remember to wipe your bottom, then . . .' and I was up the stairs yelling 'Stop! You'll give him a complex'."

 

Suchet admits he's an obsessive. He sat in Freud's London house. He went to Vienna where Freud taught. He had Freud's day-bed, in which he died, transported onto the set. "It was the only way I could do it," he says. "I had to feel as if I was Freud."

 

Suchet likes rituals; as Freud himself might have observed, they make him feel safe. Before he sits down to work he has to tidy his desk. "If I look at something chaotic, I feel chaotic, and then I start to panic."

 

His mother, Joan Jarche, was an actress until she married Jack Suchet, a Harley Street doctor; his grandmother also acted. His younger brother, Peter, is in advertising, and his elder brother is the newsreader, John Suchet.

 

I wanted to act because it was about the only thing I was good at," says Suchet. "I hated boarding school [Wellington in Somerset] and acting was a respite from my misery. My father wasn't thrilled at the thought because he thought it was an insecure profession and he was very much a man of his times - caring but distant. He wanted me to have stability."

 

But Suchet's career has run smoothly. He was the youngest man to play Shylock professionally - at the Gateway Theatre in Chester, aged 24 - and since then he has performed a variety of roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company: Iago, Timon, Caliban, Mercutio and Tybalt. His latest role is that of John Borne, the driven, angry detective in the BBC's forthcoming two-part drama NCS: Manhunt, also starring Keith Barron and Samantha Bond.

 

He says he feels a terrible sense of loss when a role is over but he has a ritual to help with that, too: he gets into a bath and soaks and re-programmes himself. "I tell myself who I am and I run through what I do and what my wife does and I think about my children [Robert, 20 and Katharine, 18] and then I come back to being David Suchet again."

 

Suchet's father was Jewish but his mother was Church of England, and he was brought up as an Anglican. Six years ago he became a committed Christian. "It works for me," he says, "and I don't want to talk about it because it makes me sound odd, but it is intensely personal and rewarding."

 

One thing that Suchet has not achieved is Hollywood recognition. He has done some film work - A Dry White Season, A Perfect Murder - but little else. Why is that? "Oh," he says, sighing, "I know I haven't done that well in films, but then again what Englishman has? Of course Anthony Hopkins has, but now that's all he does. If I was Anthony Hopkins I'd do those films and then I'd come back here and do stage work. I'd love to do that. But I'd have to go and live in Los Angeles and meet annoying people round swimming pools and, to be honest, I'm too old for it."

 

He also has to take care of himself. Some years ago, having seen Suchet on television, a doctor wrote to him and suggested he have a check-up because he had noticed a semi-circular white rim round the bottom of his pupil.

 

"Do you see?" he says, leaping up and positioning himself under the light. It turned out that he was suffering from arcus senilis, a condition indicating high cholesterol levels and an increased risk of heart attack. As a result he has to be very careful with his diet - no fatty foods, no alcohol, definitely no cigarettes. Does he think it was a message from God? "No," he says flatly. "It was a message from a doctor."

 

David Suchet likes to think he's an old-fashioned realist. "I'm a chauvinist in the true sense of the word," he says. "I like being a man. I like taking care of my family. I couldn't cope with the young women of today. They're far too scary. I like to go on our narrow-boat with my wife and be a good father.

 

"Oh, and I don't like hanging out with actors. I never have done. But I admire lots of them. I think luvvie is the worst word anyone can use to describe actors. It's totally misrepresentative of most of us and it's an insult. I am certainly not a luvvie."

 

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