Last year when Geraldine McEwan announced her retirement from being Miss Marple, it was announced that the mantle would pass to Julia McKenzie.I wrote at the time that I wasn't at all sure whether Julia was old or fluffy enough for the role, but that I greatly admired her ability to take on different roles.
Over to the right is the first known image of Miss Marple, an illustration by Gilbert Wilkinson of Miss Marple from the December 1927 issue of The Royal Magazine and the first-known image of the character (See The Thirteen Problems)
Below are the Miss Marples of screen and television. There are 7 of them. Now that the latest has hit our TV screens you have probably been thinking about which one is closest to your idea of Miss Marple. (Please excuse the space below - I can't work out what is causing it)
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| Julia McKenzie | Geraldine McEwan | Joan Hickson | Helen Hayes | Angela Lansbury | Margaret Rutherford | Gracie Fields |
So which one is closest to your "mental picture" from your reading?
Take the poll in the side bar, and do leave a comment.
Novels featuring Miss Marple
- The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
- The Body in the Library (1942)
- The Moving Finger (1943)
- A Murder is Announced (1950)
- They Do It with Mirrors, or Murder with Mirrors (1952)
- A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
- 4.50 from Paddington, or What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! (1957)
- The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, or The Mirror Crack'd (1962)
- A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
- At Bertram's Hotel (1965)
- Nemesis (1971)
- Sleeping Murder (written around 1940, published 1976)
24 comments:
Excellent question Kerrie. I voted for Joan Hickson although I also think McEwan was good - margaret rutherford was the first one I remember seeing and she never seemed right (I did real most of the Agatha Christie novels back in my teens/twenties). Watching Julia McKenzie last Sunday night was entertaining but she seemed to insert herself more in the stories rather than observe as McEwan did.
I loved Margaret Rutherford but she was all wrong wasn't she? She and that addition Mr Stringer. I loved the music with those films.
I liked Julia McKenzie but she was a bit "Fresh Fields"ish.
I'm torn between Geraldine McEwan and Joan Hickson too.
I hated Angela Lansbury and I don't ever remember seeing Helen Hayes, but I think she was only in one.
I haven't seen Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple. I have no doubt she does a terrific job, but she looks far too modern.
My vote goes to Geraldine McEwan. Joan Hickson always seemed a little too bird-like and sharp for me. I know Miss Marple was sharp, but she hid it behind dithering.
I voted for Joan Hickson, but to me Miss Marple in my mind is always my Grandma I started reading Agatha Christie when I was 9 and the description instantly reminded me of my Grandma gentle but sharp as a tack, in looks she was sort of a cross between Margaret Rutherford and Joan Hickson.
I haven't seen McKenzie yet, but I loved Geraldine McEwan. Just the right blend of intelligence, pretend dithering, and that lovely twinkle in her eye that said she understood a whole lot more than those around her might expect :-)
Joan Hickson gets my vote every time - I think she's perfect.
I haven't seen Julia McKenzie yet, but she does look a bit too modern. I have to admit that I didn't actually care very much for Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.
Angela Lansbury was all wrong. Margaret Rutherford although superb wasn't right either. I haven't seen the other two.
Joan Hickson for me, and also, apparently, for Agatha Christie. She saw Hickson in a play in the 1940s and sent her a note of appreciation in which she said she hoped that one day Hickson might be cast as Miss Marple. Christie wasn't at all happy about the casting of Margaret Rutherford and said so, but, all wrong though Rutherford was for the role, she admitted to enjoying the movies -- who could resist? That Mr. Stringer addition came about because Rutherford wanted a role for her husband -- Stringer Davis. I liked Geraldine McEwan, but those horrible 'adaptations' rendered the series unwatchable for me.
Sunnie, Heartbeat, Bronwyn & BooksPlesae - it is a hard choice isn't it? I don't think either of McEwan or Hickson gets the village busbody streak quite right though. Mind you I think Christie changed Miss Marple as the books progressed. She really didn't feel very likeable in the first one ( see my post on THE MURDER AT THE VICARAGE where the vicar comments on how dangerous she is)
Margaret Rutherford IS miss Marple - the others are impostors. The wonderful Wayne agrees :)
Thanks for those bits of info Phillip. I didn't know Rutherford was married to him!
I thought those films had an element of humour in them that you don't find in the others.
Can you tell me about some of the adaptations?
I vaguely remember somewhere this week about Miss Marple getting a role in a book she didn't actually appear in (does that make sense?)
Margaret Rutherford always seems a larger person than Jane Marple Sally, but for so long, for us, she WAS Miss Marple. I loved her lantern jaw and her rather bandy legs!
For once it seems that I am in the majority with Joan Hickson. I think it is very important who you have seen in the role first.
Most welcome, Kerrie. The changes made to Christie's novels for the McEwan series made them scarcely adaptations at all. Two were not Marple novels in the first place. Elsewhere, in A Body in the Library, the identity of the murderer was changed from a male character to a female, seemingly to accommodate a lesbian theme and thus a change in motivation. I think much the same was done with A Murder is Announced. Throughout the series, major characters are elided, new ones introduced, motives altered. Miss Marple in one is supposed to have had an affair with a married man during WW1, which requires not only a major change in her character, but also her age, or else the chronology of the entire series of books. All in all, they might just as well have started out only with Miss Marple and written entirely new scripts.
I agree Dorte, although in my case, Margaret Rutherford and Miss Marple in the books felt physically different
I think you are wrong with the last one Philip because I think there is a reference in one of the books to the love of Jane Marple's life, the soldier who never came back. But it is how interesting how we can get to the stage where we can't distinguish (or keep apart) what we read in the books, and what television has added.
In the Murder She Wrote series which Angela Lansbury was in I think there were many additions to the original plots.
It is the same sort of thing that we have seen with the television adaptations in particular of the Dalziel & Pascoe novels. I once asked Reg Hill about how he felt about them and he shrugged his shoulders, said he was not consulted, and that he never watched them
You are quite right, Kerrie. Mea Culpa. That was, in fact, in Murder in the Vicarage. Christie herself strew a little confusion here and there. In Marple's first appearance, in a short story of 1928, she's described as wearing a black brocade dress, black lace mittens, and a black lace cap atop a mound of snow-white hair. Her blue eyes are faded. And so the notion of her having a romantic attachment to a soldier who died in a war that ended ten years previously seems a bit out of joint. Christie at some point, perhaps in an interview, said Marple was "born at the age of 65 to seventy." Say 65 in 1928, she would have been born in 1863 and so 51 at the start of the Great War. If she was up to that sort of malarkey with a married man at that age at that time, we shall have to conclude that Jane was what Eric Idle called "a bit of a goer, know what I mean?" As Christie had this in mind at the start, it might also explain why Marple in the early books is also considerably more shrewish and judgemental than she later appeared later -- perhaps this late romance was intended to make the early Jane something of a bitter and frustrated spinster. And then again, perhaps Agatha was not thinking too clearly and just winging it.
The first Dalziel/Pascoe series was, of course, a complete fiasco and Hill wouldn't allow a second season. But he did agree to that second attempt -- better, though as devotee of the novels I don't much care for them -- and I read that in contemplating that deal, he sought the advice of another crime writer who told him to take the money and run. And that's what he did. Wise advice, wise man.
Thanks for clearing that up Philip. Your knowledge is much more detailed than mine. Do you blog about Christie novels somewhere?
Ruth Rendell did a similar cut and run with the Wexford novels when they were first turned into TV. She did say that she realised she was unable to control what TV adaptations did, but she was very happy with the actor chosen for Reg Wexford.
No, I don't blog at all, Kerrie. I'm not even a particular fan of Christie's. I just have an odd sort of memory, though not an infallible one, as we have seen, and I'm a quick researcher when something needs clarifying.
Here's an odd thing. In P.D. James' Death in Holy Orders, I came across this sentence this morning: "Dalgliesh saw that Father John was addicted to the women writers of the Golden Age: Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh." James has never made any bones about being less than impressed by Christie, and I'm wondering if she was having a bit of a dig here.
Last nights's Agatha Christie Miss Marple TV movie was the perfect illustration of what we have been discussing Philip. It was MURDER IS EASY and should have been Superintendent Battle but Miss Marple had been substituted. I still can't work out how she wormed her way into staying in the village.
I've found the short story you alluded to earlier with the first description of Miss Marple in it, sounding like she's in widow's weeds. Sounds much older than she appears to be in later books.
Neither she nor Hercule Poirot age do they?
I like them all, but think Geraldine McEwan is my favourite. Hickson I thought just a shade too dour. I am enjoying Julia McKenzie but then I am a fan.
Cheers,
Brian
Brian, I still don't know which is my favourite. I think Joan Hickson is a bit too "pursed lips" for me
No, Kerrie, I don't think they age, except in the case of one exceptional book. In Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, which Christie wrote in the early 40s but held back for publication until the end of her life --posthumously, as it turned out -- Poirot is old and sick, and the plot requires that he be so. I think it one of her very best. Miss Marple, as was perhaps obvious when we looked at her earlier -- born in 1863 at the latest, in 1928 dressed like a chronically Late Victorian spinster aunt, and decidedly acidulous, needed to become younger, not older. You know better than I on this, but I think the changes start to take place very soon after The Tuesday Night Club and Murder at the Vicarage. Her success in detecting really depended upon her understanding of things around her, not constant judgement of them, and not certainly a stready flow of pretty shrewish gossip, and that understanding required keeping up with the ways of the times as they passed.
Hello,
I'm a German pupil and I have to write a skilled work about Miss Marple.The topic deals with the question if Margaret Rutherford or Joan Hickson is the "better" Miss Marple. One point is called the fans' opinion and it would be nice if you could tell me your opinion and name the reasons why you like the one actress more than the other.
Thanks a lot for your help.
I think for me, while I emjoyed the performance of Margaret Rutherford, she really didn't fit the description of Miss Marple in the books. She was far from small and old.
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