It was during the 60s that Miss Marple was first adapted to the screen. From 1962 to 64 four Miss Marple movies were made featuring Margaret Rutherford as the main character.
The titles are Murder She Said, Murder at the Gallop, Murder Most Foul and Murder Ahoy! Murder Ahoy isn’t based on any of Agatha Christie’s novels. Margaret Rutherford was a comic actress and gave the role and energetic and loud profile that seems a bit at odds with Miss Marple’s personality. Christie herself doesn’t seem to have been to fond of those adaptations at first but one of her later books is dedicated to margaret Rutherford so it might be that she ended up having some appreciation for them.An interesting detail is that a young Joan Hickson had a part in one of the movies and apparently Christie told she would like for her to portray Miss Marple one day. Profetic words…
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Helen Hayes portrayed Miss Marple in movies called A Caribbean Mystery(1983), and Murder with Mirrors(1984). She was a stage and movie star long before starring as Miss Marple and few other famous names can be recognized in the movies. For instance in Murder with Mirrors an all star cast which included Bette Davis and Sir John Mills was assembled to act with her, despite that some of the reviews were less than stellar. She was closer to the birdlike quality of the character imagined by Christie who persisted till she got the answers she needed. The movies are interesting for fans of Agatha Christie who will definitely want to take a look at them but Miss Marple is maybe a bit too neat and not quite as we imagined her. Strangely these movies are set even more close to our times. What were they thinking?
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We’re having some problems displaying a video of Murder With Mirrors, so here’s the link.
Another all star cast surrounded Angela Lansbury in the movie The Mirror Crack’d in which St Mary Mead becomes the set of an historical movie and the inhabitants are naturally curious about seeing movie stars at close range. The bickering between the two main stars – Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak – make for some humourous scenes. Lansbury’s Miss Marple is a bit young for the role but she is tenacious when looking for clues and when her nephew asks for her help she does deliver the culprit. The movie is set in the 1950s as Christie wrote it.
On a curious note Angela Lansbury later starred in the Murder She Wrote series whose main character was partially based in Miss Marple.
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