David Suchet has always been strangely invisible. Behind the perfectly waxed moustache of Hercule Poirot, he became one of the most familiar presences on British television – but only by disappearing completely into the role.
“I am prone to that, because of the extremity of the characters I play,” he tells me. Suchet’s real talent has always been for exploring the darker side of the psyche – whether as a slippery Caliban in The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a Salieri twisted by jealousy in Amadeus on Broadway, or the corpulent Robert Maxwell in a TV drama about the press baron’s life. (He’s soon to play another newspaper mogul in BBC One's Press, which meant resisting the temptation...