Henry Goodman thought it was all over. During lockdown, and then the period when theatres remained shut even as the world was reopening, one of the most celebrated actors of his generation thought his career had ended.
He had been cast in the lead role of Bertold Brecht’s Life of Galileo and spent half a year or more learning the lines when, like many shows, it was cancelled.
However, today Goodman’s moustache is testament to his worst fears being avoided. This weekend he appears at Chichester Festival Theatre as Hercule Poirot in Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express.
Henry Goodman in rehearsal for Murder on the Orient Express (Photo: Johan Persson)
For the 72-year-old actor, it is a life-affirming return to the stage after the pandemic.
“I know it was not unique to me but it was a traumatic 18 months or so,” he reveals. “I was supposed to play Galileo [in Brecht’s Life of Galileo] which I’d been working on for eight months. We had the first day of rehearsal and Daniel Evans [Chichester’s artistic director] came in deeply upset and said ‘It’s cancelled’.”
He spent months keeping the play’s 100 pages of dialogue in his head, should the production be saved. But the chances of that happening faded away. He kept as busy as he could. There was some charity work for the NHS and he recorded a couple of books. Like many actors there was also the occasional gig to be done on Zoom. But, he says, he began to feel depressed.
“It was just really scary,” he whispers as if haunted by the possibility of those times returning. “As Arthur Miller pointed out when I played in Broken Glass [about a Brooklyn Jewish woman who becomes physically paralysed after reading about Kristallnacht] people of high energy and appetite — when they go down, they go down.” And Goodman went down.
“That certainly happened to me,” he says. “I really went into a vortex. I became insular, anti-social and grumpy.’” His wife Sue, who recently retired as artistic director of The Royal Academy of Dance’s community Step into Dance programme, had her work cut out, he admits. “I’m a pain in the neck when I’ve got nothing to do.”
But he started to turn the corner when he accepted how lucky he has been. “I’ve had a fantastic career. The young were the ones who had come out of drama school and university and had everything been pulled out from under them were the ones traumatised by the situation. ‘How dare I be indulgent?’ [I told myself.] But I was low,” he says plaintively.
Then a certain Belgian detective came along. So, a little like Poirot, Goodman is back.
Ludwig’s adaptation is framed as a flashback and sees Poirot looking back over the events that took place on the eponymous train. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have cast me,” says Goodman. “I’m 72.”
Henry Goodman as Poirot in rehearsals for Murder on the Orient Express( Photo Johan Persson)
But he could quite plausibly play a character 20 years younger or older, such is the actor’s range. Indeed, a case could easily be made that Goodman is this country’s most diverse performer, not just because of the ages he can play but the roles he has clocked up, from the classics to classic musicals.
His Richard III (for the RSC) was as murderous as his Hitler-inspired Arturo Ui. His Billy Flynn in Chicago was so smooth you could ski down him.
All were acclaimed, except the ill-fated turn as Bialystock in The Producers when Mel Brooks famously sacked him over “artistic differences”.
Of all these villains, Roy Cohn, from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, remains among the most vivid for the actor. “He was an absolute swine. Charismatic, vicious and an anti-homosexual homosexual,” he says, as if he had met Senator McCarthy’s lawyer which, in a way, he did.
Being cast in such roles has a double-edged element for Goodman. He has wondered if being Jewish is behind why he is chosen for characters that are manipulative and ruthless, qualities which have often been associated with Jews. On the other hand, they are great roles. “They have to see you have the cahones, charisma and chutzpah to play them,” he says.
What about the facial hair? He grew a beard and moustache for his acclaimed Shylock, which is still the performance against which all subsequent Shylocks are judged (they generally fall short).
“I’ve never had to grow a moustache except when I had a big beard to play Tevye,” he says.
Playing Tevye (Photo: Getty Images)
The new moustache for Poirot is well on its way. How much more growth has it to go? “If I let it grow I’ll look like Einstein,” says Goodman during a break in rehearsals. However, when his eyebrows arch over his glasses he is less Einstein than Groucho.
“People see you differently with a moustache,” observes the actor. “One woman came up to me and said ‘You look very distinguished’.”
Of course Goodman is distinguished. He has been nominated four times for an Olivier Award, winning two of them; one for his performance in Sondheim’s Assassins directed by Sam Mendes in 1993 and the other for his Shylock in 2000, described by the late Sir Antony Sher as “the best”.
Yet as the conversation turns to “authenticity casting” and the debate that has recently gripped the theatre world and polarised people on the issue of whether quintessentially Jewish characters should only be played by Jews, Goodman is reticent when I ask him for an opinion.
You can’t blame him. The issue went viral worldwide after my JC interview with Dame Maureen Lipman in which the star supercharged the debate by questioning whether her fellow Dame Helen Mirren should be cast as Golda Meier in a forthcoming movie about the former Israeli president.
The row prompted other Jews in the profession to take the opposite view. Among them was the playwright and director Patrick Marber, who argued: “I want us Jews to be liberal-minded and generous. I think a gentile can play a Jew and a Jew can play a gentile.”
But it is clearly not a debate that Goodman relishes, even though he is in Mirren’s film. In Golda, he plays Shimon Agranat, who headed the commission into Israel’s and Golda Meir’s lack of preparedness before Egypt attacked Israel in 1973.
“I just zoomed in and out for a couple of days filming,” says Goodman, though he researched the role as rigorously as he would if he were playing the lead. “You’ve got to do the lines you’ve got,” he adds, no matter how few they are. “All that untold subtext is [still] the challenge.”
He feels on surer ground talking about his early passion as an East End boy “to be a British actor.”
“I wanted to be allowed into the profession. That was what was deep down inside,” he says.
His point appears to be that in the early years of his career, he spent a good deal of energy proving he should be cast in great roles. So he is not much interested in arguing that other actors should be restricted from playing the characters they want to play, whether Jewish or not.
However, he is being as diplomatic as his Sir Humphrey in Chichester’s production of Yes, Prime Minister. So again I nudge, hoping for something a little less equivocal.
“If I have to be pushed then I would say I’m less Maureen and slightly more Patrick,” he finally says.
The really important question, however, to which every Poirot obsessive must know the answer, is how will the Goodman moustache end up? Will it be manicured and waxed, the hallmark of David Suchet’s Belgian detective in the 70 episodes of Agatha Christies’ Poirot on ITV? Or will Goodman allow it to grow into the monster recently sported by Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, which resembled two ferrets with the heads rising under his nostrils as if singing in harmony?
Or (God forbid) might Goodman ultimately opt for no moustache at all? Or John Malkovich’s goatee, as seen on the BBC’s ABC Murders? Possibilities are endless.
“I’m a magpie,” admits Goodman when it comes to being influenced by the performances of others. “But I don’t want to give it away. Though it’s certainly not going to be a Branagh.”
Murder on the Orient Express is Chichester Festival Theatre until 4 June
