AMC Theaters has posted a new video with filmmaker Kenneth Branagh this week in which he discussed the possibility of a ‘Christie-verse’ in the wake of the release of “Death on the Nile”.
Specifically, Branagh says he’d love to do a film with Agatha Christie’s other most famous sleuth, Miss Jane Marple, and mentions the possibility of his take on the detective Hercule Poirot character meeting her on screen.
The character is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur consulting detective. Often dismissed or underestimated, she has shrewd intelligence and world-class skills of deduction. Branagh says of his love for the Marple character:
“I’d love to see Marple in a movie universe. I really would. She’s a brilliant, brilliant detective. I mean, not officially a detective. She’s a brilliant sleuth. And as I’ve been researching Poirot, I’ve read many, many, many of the Marples, and it’s this other quality of being able – because of what people think they know about her – to be a detective, therefore, who can disappear, who can be invisible.
When people ignore you, it’s a terrific plus when you’re solving a crime. That means that you have an advantage, when you can see them in ways that they don’t even realize you’re observing. So Marple, like – wouldn’t it be great to put them together? I think that’d be fun.”
The characters never met in the books and while Poirot had many more stories than Marple who had twelve novels and several short stories. The most famous tales included “4.50 from Paddington,” “The Body in the Library,” “The Murder at the Vicarage,” “A Murder Is Announced” and “The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side”.
Various people have portrayed the character on film and television over the years including Angela Lansbury, Helen Hayes, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie. Margaret Rutherford famously played a lightly comedic version across four movies in the 1960s.
To date, the most definitive version of the character remains Joan Hickson who starred in telemovie adaptations of all twelve novels for The BBC from 1984 to 1992.
The one time Marple and Poirot did come together was when the best actors to play both characters – namely Hickson and actor David Suchet – dressed in full costume and posed for media in 1990 to celebrate Christie’s centenary celebrations in her hometown of Torquay. A photo of that meeting is up on Twitter.
Source: AMC
