However, his facial hair is described as 'military' in his first adventure The Mysterious Affair at Styles, so the movie could be pulling from this for inspiration. GettyĪs for Poirot's moustache, in the novels it is not covering up any scars. Her books are inconsistent about exactly how old Hercule Poirot is. Despite this, the detective was still solving crimes well into the 1960s.Īgatha Christie signing books in the 1950s. The author never gave Poirot an explicit date of birth, but scholars have placed his birth year at anywhere between 18 based on various clues. Generous viewers could see this as a tribute to Christie's own inconsistencies as to the character's age. A de-aged Branagh seems to be in his mid-twenties in the World War I section, yet the detective appears to be in his early sixties during the events of Death on the Nile, which is set in 1937-just 19 years after the end of the war. If you think about the dates of this prologue, it does not make sense. He meets her much later in life, however. In the novels, by contrast, there is only one woman the sleuth declares an interest in: a mysterious Russian aristocrat called Countess Vera Rossakoff. The film tries to explain Poirot's seeming indifference to romance as guilt over the death of this woman, who was on her way to visit him when her train was hit by a bomb. We also meet a love interest for the detective. We learn that he wears his moustache in that outrageous style as tribute to a commander in his regiment whose death he was unable to prevent, and also to cover shrapnel scarring on his face.

In this black-and-white opening scene, Branagh's version of the character gets a new backstory. (Poirot's identity as a refugee was a big part of Amazon's recent version of The ABC Murders.) In the books, Poirot was already past fighting age when the war began and moved to England as a refugee during the conflict. This changes the backstory of the detective somewhat. 20th Century Studiosįirst, there is that prologue, which shows Poirot fighting for the Belgians in the trenches of World War I. Kenneth Branagh in 'Death on the Nile.' His version of the character has some major differences from the Agatha Christie original.

Death on nile book