Joan Hickson

Agatha Christie's Note

Agatha Christie saw Joan Hickson on stage in 1946. The actress was performing in the play Appointment with Death, and the writer was so impressed that she decided to send a handwritten note to the dressing room. In that scrap of paper, she confessed she hoped to see her someday playing her beloved Jane Marple.

Hickson was forty years old at the time.

It took almost four decades for that prediction to come true on BBC screens. During that time, the actress honed her craft in supporting roles and characters who often went unnoticed by the general public. But that wait built the restraint needed for the role that would bring her international recognition at the age of seventy-eight.

The Invisible Supporting Role

In British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, her face was a constant presence in light comedies. She appeared in several installments of the Carry On series and worked under directors who wanted the air of a spinster aunt or strict housekeeper that she handled with precision. Her training came from provincial theater and an iron discipline she learned at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

She never complained about lacking the spotlight.

By 1937, she was already filming Love from a Stranger, but no one expected her real break to come when most of her contemporaries had already retired. Her career was a series of small pieces that fell into place late. Hickson wasn't chasing fame; she was after the truth of characters who were often more complex than the script called for.

The Triumph of Coolness

When the BBC began adapting Christie's novels in 1984, the network wanted a version faithful to the original text. They wanted to move away from earlier portrayals that had turned the detective into an almost cartoonish figure. Hickson brought an analytical coolness and a relentless gaze that unnerved the suspects in her stories.

And the audience responded immediately.

The actress didn't play a sweet old lady who did cross-stitch (although she did), but a woman with a surgical mind when faced with human evil. Between 1984 and 1992, she filmed twelve TV movies that were distributed in more than thirty countries. Her success was so great that Queen Elizabeth II even awarded her the Order of the British Empire after openly declaring herself an absolute fan of her work on the series.

Her last appearance as the detective was in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side in 1992. After that project, she decided to step away from the spotlight and enjoy retirement at her home in Colchester. She died at Colchester General Hospital in 1998, at the age of ninety-two, from a stroke.