Actor David Suchet takes the humorous side of Agatha Christie very seriously indeed, though an attack of Egypt tummy during filming would have been very far from funny.

ONE particular question occupied David Suchet as he put on padding and waxed moustache to play Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot once more for the TV cameras.

"How do you mince down the stairs?," he wondered. The thought was prompted by a character in Death On The Nile calling the Belgian detective a "dwarfish-looking creature mincing down the stairs".

Suchet, well-known as a stickler for detail in creating the sleuth, was determined to interpret this description as accurately as possible. "When you play him, this is the sort of thing that keeps actors awake," he says. "I decided he can't see the stairs because of his tummy, so he takes one step at a time. It's a small point but worried me for nights.

"I have tried not to be just a comic version. There's this very fine line that Agatha Christie writes. There must be a bit of the music hall there."

He enjoyed making Death On The Nile more than any other Poirot story, feeling the TV film captures the mix of humour and seriousness that Christie was keen to get in her book. The detective, who's enjoying a Nile cruise when an American heiress is murdered, is a quiet, still centre serving as a reactor for the eccentricity of other people.

"She shows the humour of the English eccentric in Egypt, a country she knew a lot about. She went there and loved it, and I hope we have done her proud."

He managed to get through filming without being affected by Egypt-tummy, saying: "You can imagine how it would have been with all that padding I have to wear. It's a huge responsibility to keep as well as you can because I'm in most scenes. A lot of the actors fell ill during the shooting. Then the day I got home I went to bed for three days with gippy tummy."

He feels the new TV film, despite being made on a smaller budget, compares favourably with the 1978 movie - being shown on C4 on Saturday - featuring the late Peter Ustinov as Poirot.

And with more TV Poirot stories planned, this isn't the last we'll see of Suchet in the role. He'd like to do Murder On The Orient Express, for instance.

A spin-off of three weeks location filming in Egypt may be a book of photographs. "I carry my camera around all the time," he says, patting the bag beside him. "My grandfather was a press photographer in the early Fleet Street days, and one of the first to use 35mm. As a photographer, I'm in good company. A lot of actors take pictures on the set. Peter Sellers was one of the most famous for it."

After recording two radio dramas and appearing in a pair of low budget British movies, Suchet plans a return to the stage this autumn. He will tour in a revival of Terence Rattigan's Man And Boy, unseen since 1963.

He'd been offered the part three times before and always said no. The idea is to tour the production, directed by Maria Aitken, before a possible London West End run.

"Rattigan hoped this was going to be his great play, because he was considered a writer who was very drawing room. He wanted to write one play that would deem him to be the English Chekhov.

"It didn't go well in London and New York. I wanted to see if there's a great play there. It destroyed Rattigan that it didn't work and he felt the world was against him. He died broken-hearted."

The actor won't be returning to Hollywood after three movies he made in LA failed to do business at the box-office. "It hasn't put me off. I went out to see what would happen and did three very nice films, but none were successful.

"Any actor who says he will turn his back on Hollywood movies is an idiot. It's a time I enjoyed but I won't be going back to do that again. I've done that and now I'm home."

We met on the day his newsreader brother John Suchet retired from ITN. David Suchet won't be following his lead. "Actors don't retire. You see less of us because the telephone doesn't ring so much. There comes a time when the business lets you go."

Death On The Nile is on ITV1 on Easter Monday at 9pm.

Published: 08/04/2004