Her film appearances include Bright Young Things (2003) and Notes on a Scandal (2006). She also starred in the original London productions of the Sondheim musicals Follies (1987) and Into the Woods (1990). A six-time Olivier Award nominee, she has twice won the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the 1982 revival of Guys and Dolls and the 1993 revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. McKenzie has also starred in numerous musicals, receiving a 1977 Tony Award nomination for her work in the Broadway revue, Side by Side by Sondheim. On television, she is known for her BAFTA Award nominated role as Hester Fields in the sitcom Fresh Fields (1984–1986) and its sequel French Fields (1989–1991), and as Miss Marple in Agatha Christie's Marple (2009–2013). She has premièred leading roles written by both Alan Ayckbourn and Stephen Sondheim. Christie knew what she was doing with a murder, after all.ĭuffers? Wash your brain out with soap and water for even entertaining such a treasonous thought.Julia Kathleen Nancy McKenzie CBE (born 17 February 1941) is an English actress, singer, presenter, and theatre director. Hickson was the perfect Marple, and the adaptations are close to the books, as they should be. But, to be honest, I'd be happy to watch any episode, any night of the year, knitting along in tribute to Miss Marple. It isn't the first murder of the episode, but it is certainly the cruellest: poor trusting Murgatroyd, strangled in the garden, left out in the rain, to be found by her devastated partner, Hinchcliffe (the glorious Paola Dionisotti). The death of Murgatroyd (Joan Sims) at the hands of the killer reveals Marple's iron core. If I had to pick a single episode to watch, it would be A Murder is Announced, which shows Marple at her avenging best. 'Then he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn.' 'Well, yes,' replies Miss Marple, thoughtfully. "Apparently, he's a … communist," whispers the vicar's wife of Edmund Swettenham in A Murder is Announced. Every new person, situation and crime is filtered through this knowledge: she is never surprised by anything. Miss Marple's great gift is to have seen every facet of human behaviour in her village, St Mary Mead. And it is the measure of a good policeman that he can recognise her brilliance in spite of her old-lady mannerisms: Chief Inspector Fred Davy (the much-missed George Baker in At Bertram's Hotel) gets her immediately, whereas poor Chief Inspector Slack (David Horovitch in The Body in the Library) is a less good judge of character. Jason Rafiel (Donald Pleasence) has her number: "She also has a mind like a bacon slicer." He is the one who nicknames her Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, in A Caribbean Mystery. Hickson's Marple is neither Rutherford's buffoon nor McEwan's camp schoolmarm: she is a frail elderly woman who is simply unshockable and fearless. Yet her mind has plumbed the depths of human iniquity, and taken it all in the day's work". There she sits, an elderly spinster, sweet, placid, so you'd think. Hickson captured perfectly the fluffy ruthlessness of Jane Marple: she has wispy white hair like the mohair she's so often knitting with her softly clicking pins the slight thickening of the voice when she's thinking the real sense that she is, as Sir Henry Clithering describes her, "one of the most formidable criminologists in England. And, by the way, when adapting a Christie novel, it would be sensible to remember that she was better at plotting than most of us will ever be, so maybe the addition of psycho lesbians doesn't improve the story (though obviously, it usually would). Suffice it to say Marple is a long way from Lucia, and that is a line which shouldn't have been crossed. And don't get me started on Geraldine McEwan, because I will only say something I regret. And in her late 70s, Hickson did, and defined Jane Marple so completely that she made the Margaret Rutherford version look like panto.
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