Why Was McEwan Replaced?

Hickson was the best Marple I have ever seen because she was a bit vague seeming, and so could gather far more insights. McEwan seemed far too shrewd to me. She radiated observation and calculation. I wouldn't relax around her, and that is Marple's greatest charm, people underestimated her because she was elderly. I don't think anyone would underestimate McEwan's Marple.

Geraldine was not replaced; she got tired of doing bad scripts and chose to leave.

She did NOT retire - you need look no further than the string of credits listed for her after she left the Marple series.

The 2004 Marple series was well cast and well costumed, but the writing during the time that Geraldine was playing the role was just G-d Awful! She was quite right to NOT renew her contract when it expired; and she very professionally did not give the real reason why.

Two things helped Julia do a better job in the role. First, the writing got a lot better after so many people during the first two seasons complained endlessly about it. Second, Julia has no problem going beyond the script if she needs to, in order to give a better performance than what was written for her.

Geraldine was a good actress but she was a script-bound actress who would not do the writers' work for them. If you gave her a good script, you got a good result. If you gave her a bad script, you got a bad result. The salient point being that whatever you gave her to do, that's exactly what she did.

Julia, by comparison, does not have a problem with adjusting what the writer gives her in order to make it better. She might not change a single word, but she will not necessarily perform the words as they are actually written.

Bette Davis did something similar but for a different reason. Davis wanted to make sure people recognised and remembered her from one film to the next, so she periodically delivered a line in a completely unnatural way - a Bette Davis way - so that people were constantly reminded they were watching Bette Davis.

Example: Davis stood in for Raymond Burr in an episode of *Perry Mason* playing an attorney named Constance Doyle. In one scene, she asks the defendant (her client) why he went to the dead man's house. As written, the line is naturally read, "But why did you go to his HOUSE?", i.e. with the stress on 'house' and the upward inflexion normal when asking a question. But that's not how she delivered the line; oh, no - to remind people they were watching Bette Davis, she deliberately misdelivered the line as "But why, did you go, to HIS; house." Her delivery had the same rhythm as "the floor of the house that JACK built."

Julia, of course, only misreads a line deliberately in order to make it better. She wants to remind you that you're watching Miss Marple, not Bette Davis.

Geraldine, by contrast to both Julia and Bette, would not deliberately misread a line. The result, alas, was that her portrayals of Miss Marple were anything but Miss Marple - a fact she knew better than anyone. But she was under contract, so that was that. Mercifully, you can tell just by watching and listening to the 2004 series in its early days that the problem lay entirely with the incredibly poor writing of the series, which was at least partly the result of ITV insisting their Marple series be "updated."

But if you're going to update something, you need to update it in all respects -- like the new Sherlock series, which has nothing to do with Victorian London but is nonetheless excellent. Likewise, Margaret Rutherford's Miss Marple was not anything like the character envisioned by Christie, but was nonetheless beautifully performed. But when ITV decided to update Miss Marple for their series, they made the horrid mistake of mixing and matching people from the 1930's and 1940's with attitudes and behaviours from the 1960's and 1970's; costumes and scenery that did not match the time period in which the action was set; and a whole bunch of other dreadful, dreadful errors that make that first season, in particular, very painful to watch unless you knew absolutely nothing about Agatha Christie's work *and* the United Kingdom as it actually existed and exists, rather than as American co-production companies like to think it existed and exists. And that's why the ITV Marple series started out as such an absolute failure.

So, Geraldine gave as good as she got - literally; and it's our great misfortune that what she got was very bad. Julia got better than Geraldine got, and she was able to improve it a little further - or the series would have qualified for a mercy killing. The writing, in particular, greatly improved after Julia took over the role (because the writers had to keep up with her).

By the way, Hollywood decided to not make further Marple movies with Margaret Rutherford after they learned Christie had said, of Rutherford in the role, that she "looked like an overstuffed bulldog." Rutherford herself was deeply hurt by the remark, though Christie did not intend it to be an insult.

In a very similar vein, VO5 stopped using Rula Lenska in its commercials after they discovered that she was *not* the hugely famous star of British stage and screen that they thought she was. That, alas, was a shame -- because while Rula certainly was not as famous in Britain at that time as, say, Maggie Smith or Joan Plowright; she was a *household name* in the United States thanks to those commercials - and *very* well liked. We didn't know who the hell she was, but we loved her just the same. So, it wasn't a very bright marketing decision by VO5 to stop making them.