David Suchet has spent much of much his career playing an outsider. Photo / AP
Next month, David Suchet will be celebrating 50 years in the acting profession. However, he very nearly didn't make it past the first year.
As a struggling actor, he was working at formal menswear specialists Moss Bros in Covent Garden and was on the cusp of applying for a full-time position as a junior manager when he received a call that changed everything.
Suchet explains: "It turned out to be my agent who told me he had a job, a non-speaking role in a TV series [The Protectors] — 'a terrorist who gets blown up. It's a day's filming and you go to Venice'. I said 'Yes' at once and never went to that interview."
Had that call not come through, we might have been robbed of one of our leading actors, who has made his mark in Shakespeare at the RSC and in the West End in everything from the embittered Salieri in Amadeus to the acidic, academic George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
He's the king of high-definition character acting, subsuming himself in roles, displaying a knack for drawing you in without quite yielding up a character's central enigma.
On television, his glories include award-winning turns as the financier Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now and as Robert Maxwell in a standalone drama that earned him an Emmy. Then there is his performance as Poirot, which it's no hyperbole to describe as a global phenomenon. It ran for 70 episodes and attracted 700 million viewers between 1989 and 2013.
We meet at Wilton's Music Hall in east London, a venue he adores. Suchet cuts an imposing but approachable figure. He says he makes it a point of order never to appear too daunting or dismissive. And I wonder whether he expects to encounter Poirot devotees once he opens Arthur Miller's The Price in the West End this coming month.
"It still goes on," he says. "Every day someone will come up and talk to me about Poirot, and I'm sure that will be the case during The Price. People adore Poirot. He fascinates and inspires them — I think because he's on the good side. The letters I get are extraordinary — people say they watched it in hospital and it made them feel better. People who have got divorced said it got them through dark times. I feel very grateful. Poirot will be there until I die."
We're meeting just weeks after John Malkovich garnered praise — to some surprise — for bringing an unusual grizzled, haunted quality to the sleuth in Sarah Phelps's dark, liberty-taking BBC adaptation of The ABC Murders. And in 2017, Kenneth Branagh donned a magnificent 'tache for a big-screen Murder on the Orient Express — to mixed reviews.
Has he seen these upstarts? Suchet's reply is diplomatic. "I knew people would want to know what I thought so I decided not to watch them, so I can't comment," he says. Did it pain him to read rave reviews for Malkovich? "No, I don't feel any rivalry. If there's a pang, it's that I miss Poirot personally."
He's sanguine about the push into terrain many regard as "his".
"Interpretations need to change according to taste. Characters must develop and there will be new ideas. But my brief was to be Agatha Christie's Poirot — that was the title. You got from me the canon as she wrote it.
"I was asked to continue with stories she didn't write. I said no."
Suchet said "no" a lot — and right from the start. He adheres to a credo of trying to serve the authorial intention in so far as he can fathom it — a self-effacing approach he developed at the RSC in 1982, aware that he was falling into what he calls the "me-me-me trap of acting".
So he resigned from Poirot before the filming of the first series even started because he wasn't given a character-faithful morning suit to wear — the director (Edward Bennett) had to back down.
"I wasn't easy to work with," he concedes. "Every time I was asked to do something I knew wouldn't fit with Agatha Christie's Poirot, I refused."
The Price finds Suchet, now 72, doing something completely different — and yet in some ways in keeping not only with Poirot but with much else in his career: playing an outsider.
You can trace a line through his CV to Gregory Solomon, Miller's wisecracking 89-year-old New York Jewish furniture dealer; this eccentric character, drawn from a world that Miller (himself Jewish) saw first-hand, is brought in to appraise a job-lot of antique heirlooms stashed in a Manhattan attic.
He ends up becoming a quasi-arbiter between the estranged brothers, a downbeat cop and a successful (but haunted) surgeon, who have a claim on the windfall.
"So many of my roles have been misfits, the outsiders — in Shakespeare alone Shylock, Iago, Caliban," he explains. "That's partly my appearance — I don't have a typical Brit look. And it goes with my disposition. I understand people who feel on the edge of things."
He describes himself as "a hotchpotch of identities. I'm British. I was brought up in Christian schools — the son of a Harley Street surgeon — and I'm a Christian with Jewish ancestry on both sides of the family."
Raised without religion, he became a Christian in 1986 while filming Harry and the Hendersons in the States. He turned to the Bible and found St Paul's Epistles to the Romans.
"It's too huge a subject to discuss in brief," he says. "We live in a supermarket society where people want to box you in, but I can't easily be boxed in. I'm part of the Establishment yet also an enigma. I find the mix enriching."
The Jewish ancestry has directly informed his portrayal of Solomon. The character has a Russian-Yiddish accent and migrated to the States in a way that mirrors the upheavals experienced on the paternal side of Suchet's family, albeit that his grandfather, Isidor Suchedowitz, left what is today Lithuania for South Africa (his son, Jack, emigrating to England in 1932).
His stirringly authentic-feeling performance — a triumph when it was first seen at the Theatre Royal Bath last year — arrives amid a heated debate about authenticity in acting, and calls to ensure that minority groups are faithfully represented.
"I'm worried about it," he says. "I've seen a lot of change in 50 years. Multicultural casting took time to adapt to. I had to work on myself to become more open-minded, and stop hanging on to fuddy-duddy traditions. Theatre has to evolve. It's never going to be the same again, but there's a danger we're actually becoming narrower. Art must be free if it's to express itself — you should serve the writing. I've just been in a Pinter play [The Collection] where I played a gay character. I'm not gay but it crossed my mind, 'Will there be objections?' I asked [gay co-star] Russell Tovey if he minded, he said 'Absolutely not', but it's up for debate.
"I'm very passionate that performers should have the opportunity for their talent to emerge," he adds, "but to say actors should only play themselves would render character-actors redundant. If you take this to an extreme conclusion, I couldn't have played Poirot because I'm not Belgian. If this is the way it's going, I'll be out of a job."
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