It’s only really odd in that most Miss Marples don’t, but think it through for a moment and there’s no reason why a woman who was young in the Edwardian era particularly wouldn’t smoke – it’s just not mentioned in the books, so we assume she doesn’t.īeyond that, Lansbury’s Miss Marple is a revelation in quickness and depth – a kind of blueprint, based on the books, which Hickson’s Marple would in many ways significantly emulate and then make her own. If there’s one oddity about Lansbury’s Marple, it’s a tiny thing, in that she’s seen smoking in one scene. Physically, she made her neither especially robust, nor especially frail, the kind of wind-up older woman who has things to do, people to talk to, and who knows every secret in the world of her orbit, whether or not she chooses to share them with anyone. She made her Miss Marple bright, deep, inquisitive, and always striving to see the exact way of things, irrespective of the noise and clutter that forced its way to the front of the picture. Before Hickson’s natty, knowing, needle-minded Marple, Lansbury in essence redeemed the character from the Rutherford inheritance. Throw in some more domestic UK legends and you can count Charles Gray, Geraldine Chaplin, Margaret Courtenay, Carolyn Pickles, Charles Lloyd-Pack, an unrecognisable and uncredited Piers Brosnan, John Bennett, Dinah Sheridan, and Nigel Stock into the mix.Īll together, supporting Angela Lansbury in her outing as Miss Marple is some serious star power and some high-quality acting talent too.Īnd above all, in sharp contrast to Rutherford’s “clever clown” interpretation of the role, Angela Lansbury took Miss Marple deadly seriously. Want more? How about the three male leads in the piece being played by Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Edward Fox. How all-star are we talking about? Well, the two leading ladies, besides Lansbury herself, are played by Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak – is that all-star enough for you? As McKenzie has pointed out, the truth is that Christie wrote Miss Marple in two distinct directions over time, and each of them have embodied the “kind” of Miss Marple appropriate to their televised stories.īut all of this rather leaves one pristine Miss Marple unfairly overshadowed.īefore she stepped into the writerly shoes of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote in 1984 (coincidentally, the same year Joan Hickson became a legendary Miss Marple on British TV), Angela Lansbury got a taste of the sleuthing game in the 1980 all-star – no, really, allll-star – movie version of the Miss Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side – shortened to simply The Mirror Crack’d for movie audiences. Relatively recently, there have been two new TV Marples, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie, and each has their devoted fans, despite each taking a different direction on the character. Contrary to her view of Rutherford’s Marple, Christie herself told Hickson she hoped she would one day play the role – albeit forty years before she ever got the chance to do so!īetween them, these two constitute the “Major Marples” of public memory. Joan Hickson on the other hand, was a rather more petite, bird-like Miss Marple, quieter, but with the most piercing blue eyes and the ability to speak a lot of hard truths when the need arose. Margaret Rutherford embodied a sturdy Miss Marple in a series of films that, while still delivering some of Christie’s twists (albeit, ironically, sometimes in plots filched from Hercule Poirot stories!), verged much more on a comic element in the character and the situations in which she frequently found herself than Christie ever wrote – or indeed, apparently approved of. In the great battle to decide which of the actresses who have played Agatha Christie’s sharp-eyed busybody sleuth, Miss Marple, there are two main camps, and a scattering of support for the rest.
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