A new Miss Marple is on the case for 'Masterpiece Mystery!'
Whether in print or on film and television, the Miss Marple mysteries of Agatha Christie remain favorites of whodunit lovers around the world, and the main character has attracted such A-list actresses as Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury, Helen Hayes and, most recently, Geraldine McEwan.
It’s easy to see, then, why actress Julia McKenzie had some butterflies about taking over this iconic role in four new “Miss Marple” episodes for “Masterpiece Mystery!” on PBS starting at 9 p. m. Sunday.
“It was completely daunting,” says McKenzie, a “Masterpiece” fan favorite for her performance as the cow-loving widow Mrs. Forrester in the acclaimed “Cranford” miniseries. “It’s a bit of a poisoned chalice, isn’t it, because you can’t please everybody because everyone has their own idea of what Marple should be, and you’re not going to fulfill everybody’s fantasies of it. I hope that by playing it my way it will fit the bill.”
And McKenzie’s way actually hews closer to Christie’s original character than did McEwan, whose Jane Marple was such an avidly fascinated little sparrow of a woman that you could see the mental wheels turning in every scene. McKenzie, by contrast, plays Marple as a keen observer who nonetheless looks like nothing more than a harmless old lady—which is, of course, this spinster sleuth’s chief ace up her sleeve.
“I got the part very late, and I had to hurry a bit, so I didn’t get to do all the research that I might have done, but Marple and Christie are very much a part of our lives over here,” McKenzie explains. “I just tried to make her rather an analytical brain, allied with the fact that she really believed that anyone who is evil, or does wrong, should be punished. That’s what drives her to go after the crime, and those two things make her home in on something.
“She can talk to people, and they think that she is just a silly old girl, and they tell her things that they think are harmless, and of course it’s the real minutiae of crime that she is really hot on,” McKenzie says.
“She just notices feminine things that a man inspector wouldn’t see,” she continues. “For example, in one episode, a woman dies of drinking hat paint that she thought was medicine, and Marple deduces that she wouldn’t have chosen that color of red [to have around] because she is a redhead, so someone obviously put it there. That’s where Marple scores more than a male detective like Poirot.”
The new “Marple” episodes open with “A Pocket Full of Rye,” a densely plotted head-scratcher wherein Miss Marple tries to solve a series of three murders that appear to have been inspired by the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” The program boasts a host of familiar English faces, including Helen Baxendale (Ross’ British love, Emily, on “Friends”), Matthew Macfadyen (“Little Dorrit,” “Pride & Prejudice”), Rupert Graves (“A Room With a View”), Ben Miles (“Coupling”) and, in a tiny cameo, veteran actress Prunella Scales (“Fawlty Towers”).
You don’t need Miss Marple to figure out why some of the best British actors working today line up for these Christie adaptations, McKenzie says.
“Certainly for the middle-aged to older actor, these are very attractive, because it’s a genre that they know very well and it’s a time when people had respect for one another and spoke very well,” she explains. “I think sometimes young people coming into it can’t recognize the period as much, and that’s where the director comes into their own. And how would these youngsters know about this postwar woman? It’s quite difficult for them, I think. Older actors just relish it, of course.”
She gives equally high marks to the finely wrought costume and production designs that appear throughout the series.
Currently at work filming a two-part, three-hour sequel to “Cranford,” McKenzie slips back into Miss Marple’s sensible costumes later this summer to film four more episodes in the series, for which she currently is under a four-year contract.
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