Sorry, Angela Lansbury, but This Is Hands Down the Best Miss Marple (2024)

In 1945, author Agatha Christie saw then 39-year-old Joan Hickson perform a minor role in the author’s play, Appointment with Death, and she wrote to her, “I hope someday you will play my dear Miss Marple.” Everyone knows Agatha Christie is—next to the Bible—the world’s best-selling writer and the Queen of Detective Fiction. Miss Marple is Christie’s second most popular character after her first and best-loved detective, the fussy Belgian, Hercule Poirot. Miss Marple made her debut in the magazine short story, The Tuesday Night Club, in 1927 and then appeared in 12 popular Christie novels and 20 more short stories until 1976. She is a fictional, elderly maiden lady and amateur detective with uncanny crime-solving abilities who lives in the fictional small country English town of St. Mary Mead. Christie says that she based the character on several older female friends of her step-grandmother whom she had met as a girl in the 1890s.

Unassuming to the point of invisibility, Marple has learned what she knows of human nature by observing the residents of her hometown and extrapolating their traits and flaws to those of murderers and other criminals. Consequently, her outlook—hidden behind a mask of pleasantness—is deeply cynical, and she has become valuable to local police in helping solve crimes. In The Body in the Library, her friend and mentor, retired Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, describes Miss Marple as "The finest detective God ever made.” With all that description to live up to, Joan Hickson goes above and beyond in her portrayal of Miss Marple in the BBC1 series, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

Miss Marple: The Body in the Library

See Also

Joan Hickson as MISS MARPLE – (BBC 1984-1992) – Review – The FlaneurWhat is 9/40 as a decimal? (Convert 9/40 to decimal)

Crime

Drama

Mystery

Amateur detective Miss Jane Marple investigates the murder of a young woman whose body is found in the library at Gossington Hall, home of Colonel and Mrs. Arthur Bantry.

Release Date

December 25, 1984

Cast

Joan Hickson , Gwen Watford , Moray Watson , Valentine Dyall , Frederick Jaeger , David Horovitch , Andrew Cruickshank , Ciaran Madden

Main Genre

Crime

Seasons

1

Who Is Joan Hickson?

Joan Hickson was a prolific British actress who began her career on the stage in 1927 before moving into film and television work that spanned decades through 1993. She was in her first Miss Marple film in 1961, but she was playing a housekeeper, not Miss Marple. The title character was played by comedic actor, Margaret Rutherford, who played the role in four films, only the first of which, Murder She Said, bore even a passing resemblance to any Christie story. Considered definitive at the time, Rutherford neither resembled the character described in the books nor came anywhere near her seriousness, playing her primarily for laughs.

Hickson was finally offered the role that Agatha Christie had suggested for her when she was an octogenarian in 1984, in a BBC series to be called Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, which set out to film all the Marple novels and was noted for its faithful representations of the books. The series was top-rated and is admired even today; to many, Hickson herself seemed destined to play the role. She later recorded several audiobooks of the Miss Marple stories and was awarded an OBE in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth II, who said, “You play the part (of Miss Marple) just as one envisages it.”

What Makes Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple So Special?

Gaunt, homely, and almost always in impeccable dark gray tweed, no Miss Marple before or since Hickson was more prim, restrained, and truly Victorian in the way that Christie had described her as Hickson. The official Agatha Christie website describes her performance as “intelligent and measured,” adding that it went far in popularizing the character.

As Christie described, Hickson’s key traits as Marple were cynicism and pleasantness. Her awareness of the omnipresence of evil allowed her to see everyone—no matter how young or outwardly harmless looking—as being capable of committing a crime. Despite this, she is always kind to the innocent, “naughty” children and the wayward included. She was polite to servants and shopkeepers, saving her scoldings for pompous police officers. Hickson's Miss Marple rarely smiled except when being polite, often tilting her head forward as if to listen more intently.

Hickson built her performance on thoughtful silences, as she often seems to struggle to remember, convincingly preoccupied with the mystery at hand. There’s so much going on in her head: “There was something, but now it’s gone,” she’ll say in rapid little asides to herself or to no one in particular. Her large, watery blue eyes are frequently cast upward or away when she is lost in thought, and she often does her best thinking while knitting. More than any other Marple, Hickson seems cursed by her gift of detecting. Rarely angry, prone to soft complaints like, “how very tiresome,” as well as self-deprecation: “What a muddlehead I am.” She knows her Shakespeare, nursery rhymes, and Bible—anything that illuminates human behavior.

Joan Hickson Is the Best, if Not The First, Miss Marple

Miss Marple has been portrayed by 10 women on both big and little screens (twice as a child, which doesn’t count) and not always in English. This includes Christie herself in an early radio portrayal and several stage performers, as well as Angela Lansbury, who played the character only once and is perhaps better known for playing the Miss Marple knock-off, Jessica Fletcher, for several seasons on CBS’ Murder She Wrote. The three most recent Marples—Joan Hickson, pixie-like Geraldine McEwan, and grandmotherly Julia McKenzie—played the character for the BBC or ITV, respectively, from 1984 to 1992, 2004 to 2008, and 2009 to 2013. Hickson played her the most times (12), the longest (8 years), and only Hickson filmed all 12 Marple novels.

Each interpreter brings something new and valid to the character, and each has its own fans, but, it's too bad for the successors in the role that Hickson came before them. Naturally, they each wanted to separate themselves from her performance, going for shades of nicer, which only made them more off the mark from Hickson’s high bar. It’s a perfect performance, effortless and intuitive, more actualized and incarnated than acted. There will always be new Miss Marples who will owe Joan Hickson a debt, as it was she who put the character on the map of the television landscape.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is available to stream on Britbox in the U.S.

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