If life is a mystery, that of the queen of the genre, Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, is something out of the ordinary. But if we trace his best works, we may glimpse small pieces of his imposing personality, his love life and his love of reading. This is the focus of the documentary that Movistar + premiered this month, entitled “Agatha Christie: 100 years of suspense”, directed by Sean Davison and which selects the author’s most representative novels from the first, “The Mysterious Case of Styles” published in 1920.
The choice of the works selected among the more than 66 published, is not made at random, and they are aimed at that beyond the written word, television has been one of the great beneficiaries of Christie’s work, since the little The screen has been the perfect showcase for the author’s plots, crimes and characters to the greater glory of her 3,000 million books sold and managed to further elevate two of her fetish characters, Hercule Poirot (“a short Belgian”) and Miss Marple (“an old lady”.
To help understand the personality behind the creation of the masterpieces of mystery, the documentary lends their voices and experiences, the actors Amanda Abbington, Sheila Atimel, Samantha Bond, Hugh Fraser and Philip Jackson, the producer Basi Akpabio, the screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, specialty writers Mark Aldridge and Sophie Hannah, the author’s biographer Laura Thompson, historian John Risdon, and Agatha Christie’s great-grandson James Prichard. All concentrate their praise on the creator of dozens of stories that have seen dozens of television versions, and lately film. This is how they reel off one of the works most adapted to television, “The mystery of Pale Horse”, “Ten little black men”, which has in the contemporary piece on Sundance TV, “They were ten”, one of its latest versions together with the blockbuster of the BBC 2015 in miniseries format.
The documentary also highlights two of the actors who stood out in their roles as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. The actor Hugh Fraser, who played Captain Hastings on several occasions, accompanying the Belgian detective wonderfully played by David Suchet (1989 to 2013), makes a very personal X-ray of the character Christie wanted to kill as early as 1940, but it was not achieved until the Publication of “Curtain” in 1975. The quintessential female detective was portrayed for television since her appearance in “The Murder in the Vicarage” by Geraldine McEwan. Julia McKenzie and Christie’s own favorite, Joan Hickson.
A documentary that, spiced with images from the family archive and audios of the author’s voice, takes us into the mystery that supposed that, as explained by her great-grandson, there were two Agatha Christies: «The global figure and the person to whom the family We affectionately call ” Nima ”, a kind and welcoming person ‘, yet capable of inventing and solving the most difficult crimes in world literature.
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