Rent Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures (2004)

Film not a documentary - Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures review by LN

2004. Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures

I thought when I put this one on my CP list it was a documentary on the famed and prolific crime author. Story would be interesting, I thought.

Instead it's a full film that starts out with Anna Massey as Agatha excluded rather remarkably and rudely from her own party, celebrating her play The Mousetrap's first 10 years.

I did not "get" exactly the reference to a Life in "Pictures".

AC may have been shy but she certainly wasn't thin like Massey so if you know anything about the 1960s Christie, that lone fact grated....immediately - plus I'm quite certain that by that age she was much more mature in dealing with the general public than was portrayed.

Olivia Williams playing the younger, assured Agatha thru the First World War was good, as was Ray Coulthard as her first husband, Archie the flyer and the cad.

As no one knows to this day exactly what happened to AC during the mysterious episode in 1926 when she went missing (eventually turned up at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate checked in as Mrs. Teresa Neele of South Africa) this film also speculates, as did the 70s film with Vanessa Redgrave, but it adds in a psychiatrist trying to help restore her blanked out memory. Once we'd gone through all that, the ending seemed a bit rushed through, meeting the man who became her 2nd husband on an archaeological dig. That marriage was successful and she was married to him until the end of her life. His character was glossed over and never developed but with the theme they clearly didn't think that was as important.