McKenzie appeared in a National Theatre 80th birthday tribute to Lord Olivier, Happy Birthday, Sir Larry on in the presence of Olivier himself. She has also appeared in Follies as Sally at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1987 and Into the Woods as the Witch at the Phoenix Theatre in 1990. She appeared in Side By Side By Sondheim in the West End in 1976 and on Broadway in 1977, and was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for her performance. Lovett (1994), winning the Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a Musical for each.įor her role in Woman in Mind, she received the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress. In London's West End her performing credits include Guys and Dolls as Miss Adelaide (1982) and Sweeney Todd as Mrs. 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.She was born Julia Kathleen McKenzie on 17 February 1938, in Enfield, Middlesex, England, the daughter of Kathleen Rowe and Albion McKenzie. 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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