Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot

I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot have in common?’ The answer, of course, would be David Suchet, who has impersonated all these characters on stage or television during an acting career spanning half a century.

In Behind the Lens, Suchet offers a series of autobiographical sketches, written in an amiably informal style and covering many aspects of his professional and personal life. He writes of his Jewish ancestry, his childhood, his schooldays (during which he was caned for hiding a forbidden Mars Bar in one of his shoes) and his private passions — for canals, music, foreign travel and for his family, the last being ‘the most important thing in the world to me’. He writes of his professional ups and downs: during a long period of unemployment as an actor he worked as a salesman at Moss Bros in Covent Garden and was rescued from becoming a branch manager in Manchester only by an opportune phone call from his agent.