About 'Man & Boy' hit by a tragedy, leaving your ‘character’ in the dressing room before going home, shopping habits, working mentality and an observant doctor... - bricksite.com/davidsuchet

By Mary Riddell, 29 January 2005, The Daily Mail, page 6

 

 

DAVID SUCHET, best known as Agatha Christie's Poirot, is about to star in a West End play. But it is a production overshadowed by a tragedy that he is still struggling to come to terms with, he tells Mary Riddell.

 

David Suchet is not an obviously fussy man. The lunchtime menu in the restaurant in which we meet offers dishes designed to suit the appetite of a budgie, but Suchet says politely that a light salad will suit him perfectly. When the waiter forgets to bring the oil he has requested, Suchet does not mind. Even so, you do not have to possess the investigative skills of Hercule Poirot, his alter ego, to detect a more steely character behind the benign facade.

 

After devising the central figure of his play, Man And Boy, Terence Rattigan said: 'I wrote the devil.'

For Suchet, who is about to appear as the Romanian financier Gregor Antonescu in a West End revival of the drama, evil plutocrats are a speciality. His performance as Augustus Melmotte in the television serial of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now astounded even those well aware that Suchet's repertoire went much further than Poirot's twirling moustache and patent pumps. At 59, he has combined television stardom with a reputation as one of Britain's greatest character actors, and the most assiduous.

 

To say that Suchet has suffered for his art is something of an understatement. In the mid-1980s, around the time that he was baptised as a Christian, a psychiatrist friend watched him play Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's suicidal hero, and warned that he was becoming too enmeshed for his own safety in his character's tortured mind.

'You do very much open the doors to the dark side of your life, and I was aware of my fault in letting characters overtake me and not quite knowing how to deal with it. My friend came backstage and said, "You really, really can't do this and survive." I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. So he said, "Tell me your address, your telephone number, your children's ages and where they go to school." I couldn't. He told me how to deprogramme my mind and remind myself who I was before I left the theatre. I still follow that technique, and it has transformed me.'

 

That was long ago. For many years, Suchet has lived a tranquil existence in Pinner, Middlesex, in the large, half-timbered, Agatha Christie-style house that he and his wife, Sheila Ferris, a former actress, bought from the comedian Ronnie Barker. These days, Suchet is able to keep the demons of the theatre at a safe distance. Or so he believed, until the Rattigan play surfaced.

 

Man And Boy comes to the West End bearing a heavy legacy. Rattigan, a legendary British playwright, was suffering from leukaemia when he wrote what he hoped would be his masterpiece. But, as Suchet knew, Rattigan was almost killed by anguish when the play failed in 1963. Yet Suchet could not have imagined, in any nightmare, that, 40 years later, his co-star and stage wife, Fritha Goodey, would die in the most tragic circumstances at the age of 31. In September last year, Fritha left the rehearsal room in London's Kensington and said her usual cheerful goodbye to Suchet and the rest of the cast of Man And Boy. Shortly afterwards, her body was discovered by her father at her flat in Notting Hill. She had stabbed herself to death with one knife blow to her heart.

 

Five months after Maria Aitken, the director, gathered the cast together the next morning to tell them what had happened, Suchet still relives a loss he can neither rationalise nor forget.

'Even now, I haven't begun to get over it,' he says. At first, he and his fellow actors had joint counselling to help them come to terms with the unexplained and inexplicable suicide of their friend and colleague.

Afterwards - for the first time in a career that has often brushed up against mental torment - Suchet briefly sought private help from a specialist. In those sessions, and over the ensuing months, he must have brooded on the build-up to a tragedy.

 

For Suchet, the strange story of Rattigan's doomed play began long ago, when the author of The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea produced the work that he believed would rescue him from his niche of drawingroom playwright and put him in competition with Arnold Wesker and John Osborne, the angry young dramatists of the early 1960s.  Laurence Olivier and Rex Harrison both turned down Antonescu, based on the international swindler Ivar Kreuger, and the part went to the matinee idol, Charles Boyer, who played Rattigan's evil genius as if he were a head waiter.

 

The run was a disaster from which Rattigan never recovered. Thirteen years later, he was dead. That the play was not resurrected for another four decades was mostly down to Suchet. Three times he was offered Antonescu's part by distinguished directors, and three times he rejected it. At the fourth approach, he read the script again and found it suddenly relevant, in the light of Robert Maxwell and other robber barons of modern industry. This time, he would play the devil.

 

Though Suchet is a charming lunch companion, he is also a player of unusual influence. When auditioning began for the heavily reworked play, Suchet was on the casting panel. For his stage son, Basil, he instantly chose the young actor Ben Silverstone.

'I knew at once he was the one.  He is wonderful, and born to play that part.'

 

Equally, Suchet was sure that Fritha Goodey, blonde, carefree and in her early 30s, was the right choice for Antonescu's wife, Florence.

'She had a wonderful time. She was so happy - a dear person and the sort of actress who would come into rehearsals, just to watch, even when she wasn't needed that day, because she enjoyed it so much. I never noticed anything amiss. I never saw anything but another actress having a lovely day.'

 

But there was also a hidden and tortured side to a young woman who had suffered so badly from anorexia nervosa that she was compelled to interrupt her drama studies at Lamda for three years. At one point, she was hospitalised and nearly died. She recovered to complete the course and to appear in many television shows, as well as the film About A Boy, with Hugh Grant, but she continued to struggle with a terrible anxiety about her abilities. According to her friends, she would work herself into a dreadful state over roles, never believing that she could meet her own high standards. As critics' praise for her work accumulated, few suspected that her talent and good humour masked a fear of failure.

 

On the day of her death, in the third week of rehearsal for a provincial tour, she arrived as usual to work with Suchet.

'Fritha was in all my scenes, and I had spent the whole day with her. In the last scene we rehearsed, I was asking her, as my wife, to be with me when I committed suicide. When she said goodbye, she was absolutely lovely, radiant, and thanked us all for a wonderful day. 'We never saw her again. I came in the next day to carry on, and Maria told us she had very bad news. At the end of the day, I went home on the train, staring at the evening newspaper headlines and watching the public learning what had happened.'

 

Fritha had killed herself after leaving two letters of farewell to her beloved family. A replacement actress, Emma Ferguson, began work after a brief pause for counselling. 'Maria brought in someone to talk to the entire cast,' Suchet says. 'Then I got help of my own for a couple of days.'

 

As Fritha's close friends wept at her funeral, the cast were forced to struggle on. By then, they were ten days from opening and determined to salvage a show of which she, and Rattigan, would have been proud. Though the provincial tour was brilliantly received, it is clear that no other play has weighed so heavily on a man who has been in love with theatre for most of his existence.

 

Suchet was brought up as the middle son of Jack Suchet, a Harley Street gynaecologist, and his wife, Joan, a onetime actress. Peter, the youngest brother, is an advertising headhunter, and John, the firstborn, is a retired ITN journalist who now lectures on Beethoven and whose success cast a small shadow over David's youth.

'I was very much aware of John intellectually. He was, and still is, far superior to me,' he says modestly. 'I never had a university education. I went straight from Wellington [his public school] to drama school, and it's something I miss now. I'd like to have gone to university.'

 

The survival jobs he did, such as unloading dog-food vans and working in the formal wear department of Moss Bros, evolved rapidly into a glorious acting career, ranging from the Shakespearian canon to television hits, such as Poirot and Blott On The Landscape, plus Bigfoot And The Hendersons and other wellreceived films.

 

Suchet, who sees himself as 'pure character' rather than natural Hollywood material, has always been happiest working in Britain. Though Amadeus on New York's Broadway won him a Tony award, he was desperately lonely and longed to get home to his wife, Sheila, whom he met many years ago in a Coventry theatre. 'It was love at first sight for both of us,' he says. 'Wonderful.'

 

Almost every profile of Suchet hints at a male supremacist who thinks women belong at home, but that impression is misleading.

'I'm not antifeminist at all, though I am incredibly grateful that Sheila gave up her career to look after the family. It made our relationship much easier, and I am greatly in her debt.' Their son, Robert, 23, is a captain in the Royal-Marines, and their daughter, Katherine, 21, is studying History of Art at Leeds University.

 

Sheila supervises David's career, scrutinising scripts, attending every first night and offering a critique of each performance, while he prides himself on being an oldfashioned romantic.

'I think it's wonderful to buy flowers for one's wife, or to go shopping and buy her a dress. I do tend to cause a rumpus.

I'll walk into a shop, look at about 35 dresses or so, have tea and find someone who looks like my wife to model them.' For Christmas, he bought Sheila 'a 19th-century silver and tortoiseshell jewellery box in the shape of a heart'.

 

Despite his attentiveness, there are many hints that Suchet is a more complex, exacting and needy character than his beguiling manner suggests. Even his sentimental way of hoarding old champagne corks and his Moss Bros tape measure suggests slightly obsessive behaviour. So does his habit of researching parts so meticulously that when he played Freud on stage he had the psychiatrist's old couch brought in from Vienna.

 

'I think my worst quality is perfectionism. I'm not satisfied with anything less, which means I'm never satisfied. It makes me difficult to live with. I've never, ever suffered fools gladly. I can be very, very tough professionally as well. If people are being sloppy, I'm not very nice to be around. I will demand that standards are kept, and I am a bit of a taskmaster. I think some people would find me very difficult to work with, but I'm only ever like that if I feel that people are not prepared, or not ready to work in the right way. Before I accept a role, I always meet the director and want to know who the others in the cast are. It's important.'

 

Though the hawk like eyes contain a hint of the menace he brings to his more demonic roles, Suchet seems a considerate man with no preciousness and, by an actor's standards, little vanity. I suspect that he is the person most likely to be tortured by his own obsessive ways. Hence, perhaps, the lure of a religion that he discovered around the time that he was struggling against the darkness instilled by his part as Timon.

 

Brought up as a non orthodox Jew, and later a dabbler in eastern religions, he read Romans Chapter VIII

in a hotel room Bible and 'thought this is the way I would like to live'. He was baptised in Portland, Oregon, on his next trip out, and his faith has enhanced his life.

'I've had enough of me. I'm bored with me. Acting is a very selfish life. I've always been aware that the trap of an actor's life is selfishness and egotism, and I don't want that. Recently, I was given a calendar containing quotes from the Dalai Lama. One read: "Religion strengthens the caring side of your heart." If religion can do that, then it ain't so bad.'

 

In a more secular conversion, a doctor who had watched him on television wrote to him, some time ago, to say that the white rings round the irises of his eyes could suggest high cholesterol. Tests showed that Suchet was at risk of heart disease, and he now takes medication and eats healthily.

'I'm very grateful to that man. Even if I'm taken tomorrow, perhaps I would have lived longer than I would have done if he had not alerted me.'

 

That gratitude for his own good fortune sits in stark contrast with the grief and tragedy that have dogged Man And Boy, in its genesis and, more terribly, in its revival. When Suchet walks on to the London stage as Gregor Antonescu, he will know that the broken dreams of others hang on his success. 'I don't know what's hanging over this play. I have never known one like it. But it is going on. It will have its run, and Rattigan will have his voice.' And so will Fritha Goodey, who did not live to play the part that so enthralled her and whose cheerful cry of farewell still haunts Suchet.

'Her positive spirit is still with us,' he says. 'I do feel that.'

 

 

 

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