The Best Miss Jane Marple

Imagine that you are an actress who is on the set of of a movie and the author of the book pays a visit. She takes one look at you and insists that you would be perfect to play her main detective. You would be absolutely thrilled, right? Not if you are middle-aged and the author is Agatha Christie-her female detective is so ancient when she makes her very first appearance in 1930 that no one has a clue how old she is. Well, this is what happened to Joan Hickson on the set of Murder She Said - aka 4.50 From Paddington in 1961. Hickson was 55 and she was not thrilled. In this movie Hickson was playing Mrs. Kidder opposite Margaret Rutherford as the great detective. One wonders whether Rutherford heard about this recommendation and if so, what she thought of it. It is ironic, then, that Joan Hickson would later agree to portray Jane Marple in several TV movies. Agatha Christie got her wish after all-8 years after the author died.

Her adaptations were superior to others, before and after, for 2 reasons: the screenplays are faithful to the novels; and Hickson is an accurate portrayal of the character.

As popular as Rutherford was, she portrayed Marple as if she were a crazy and outlandish woman and there was none of this in the books. Furthermore, there were liberties taken. One of the most notable was the series creating a character out of the wind to allow the actress's real-life husband to have a steady job playing her sidekick. Why do this? There was a perfectly good character already created by Christie who appeared in several, but not all, of Marple's mysteries-novel and short story length: Sir Henry Clithering, retired C.I.D. head. It would have made perfect sense for Sir Henry to be written into the mysteries in which he originally never appeared. This would be similar to adding Inspector Japp and Captain Hastings to Poirot mysteries opposite David Suchet. The characters actually appeared only in a few of the mysteries, but they fit in nicely to the TV series.

Joan Hickson first appeared as Jane Marple in 1984 in the TV movie The Body in the Library and last appeared in 1992 in the movie The Mirror Crack'd. She made one more screen appearance, period, before retiring . Perhaps she had wanted to wait until she had filmed all of the Marple mysteries before retirement. There was no attempt to film any Christie mysteries which did not include Miss Marple and simply write her in to them. This is what the current TV series has done. Purists beware! Joan Hickson died in 1998 at the age of 93.