Country manors across the British Isles become crime scenes.
The author looks around the dinner table, wondering: How might these fine people kill one another?
It has been a century of undimmed popularity.
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The movies were still silent and Angela Lansbury was just two years old.
Half a century later, she was glamorous, sozzled, and doomed in 1978’sDeath on the Nile.
She also played Miss Marple, one of Christie’s most iconic characters, inThe Mirror Crack’d.
‘Death on the Nile’.20th Century Studios
After Miss Marple, Lansbury was another savvy elder solving quaintly nasty crimes onMurder, She Wrotefor 12 years.
Do these adaptations and homages really do Christie justice?
Her best works present lifestyle tourism with a touch of class-conscious schadenfreude.
Dame Agatha, the socialist?
Certainly, every actor who’s interested should get their shot at Christie on the big screen.
“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend,” Poirot says inStyles.
JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images
The Murder at the Vicarage"The story makes the English village seem lethal."
4.50 From Paddington"Another [Miss] Marple story.
It’s brilliantly specific.There’s no guff."
“I associate Agatha Christie not with safe drama but with something edgy,” he says.
“[Take] the plot ofAnd Then There Were None it’s almost like Friday the 13th.”
(Branagh calls the book “very lusty.")
“Clark Collis
Agatha Christie’s Golden Century
1920:The Mysterious Affair at Styleshits shelves.
1926:The author goes missing for 11 days; her time away is never fully accounted for.
1945:The filmAnd Then There Were Nonedebuts.
1974:Orient Express nabs six Oscar noms.
1976:Christie passes away.
1989:Agatha Christie’sPoirotpremieres on ITV.
2020:The Mousetrappauses its its 68-year theater run.
