Anthony Higgins in 2000s
2010
Marple
Season 5, Episode 2
The Secret of Chimneys
"Agatha Christie's Marple" series, launched in 2004, is different from other adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple stories with a complete alteration of the original sources. To recognize great writers' works in the series is pretty hard, but for those who have never read the stories it has simple moves, clear deeds of heroes, and if anything does not fit... well, sometimes Christie had misses too.
Many years before the main events in the Chimneys castle occur was a crime - an expensive gem disappeared, and along with it a young maid. At the beginning of the current developments, Count Stainach offers to buy the castle and Lord Caterham agrees. But that same night, after the sale is contract signed, the count is murdered in a secret corridor of the castle. Miss Marple takes on the investigation.
I retold the story as if Anthony Higgins has the main role. No, this role (as it has happened in Mr. Higgins' career many times before) is just a propulsion of the plot. As the script has almost nothing in common with the book, there is no sense as it goes into the details of the characters' changes.
Picking up small but important roles, Anthony Higgins has the ability to not only get a fee and to remind the public of him, but again and again to show how good he is as an actor, who makes tiny and almost uncharacterized roles into larger, deeper with inner essence characters.
At the beginning of the episode Higgins recites a letter to Lord Caterham; when the episode has not yet reached its middle, his character has disappeared until the end, when all secrets will become clear as he appears once again in a flashback.
In his first appearance in this episode, Mr. Higgins looks like Count Dracula who suddenly dared to go under the sun - a tall one, thin as a rake, he holds his cloak loping by the wind, and he is similar to the bold demon of the night Higgins was once. Later he dances, just as he did as Johann Strauss with nobility and style. A sophisticated viewer might also connect this role to Higgins' waltzing King Abdullah of Sidon in Lace. It is not a combination of them, his best roles, but it has their echoes, drilled and refined to a perfect cross-section that can crack at any moment.
;)
