The Mirror Crack’d is available on DVD on Amazon. Portrayed as a crisp, stiff, intelligent woman, Lansbury’s Miss Marple is also one of the few incarnations who smoked! Now that we’ve counted up all the responses, we can reveal the Top 5!Ĭan you guess whose Miss Marple performance is the most popular?įour years before she became Jessica Fletcher in TV’s Murder, She Wrote, English-Irish-American actress Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in a movie adaptation of Christie’s 1962 novel, The Mirror Crack’d.ĭirected by Guy Hamilton, who’d previously directed four classic James Bond movies, the film featured an all-star cast, with big names including Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Geraldine Chaplin, Tony Curtis, and Kim Novak. We asked fans to vote for their favourite interpretation of the character in our exclusive poll. Technically, however, British actress and singer Gracie Fields did briefly play her first in a one-off episode of Goodyear TV Playhouse in 1956, based on A Murder is Announced. Miss Marple made her stage debut in a touring production of Murder at the Vicarage in 1949, but it wasn’t until 1961 that she arrived on the big screen and her first TV appearance wasn’t until 1983, when American actress Helen Hayes made the first of two TV movies. While it had been written around 1940, Sleeping Murder wasn’t released until 1976, after Christie’s death. A further eleven novels followed, culminating with Sleeping Murder. It wasn’t until 1930 that the character’s first full-length novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, was published. Miss Marple first appeared in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927, titled The Tuesday Night Club. Mary Mead is one of the best known of Agatha Christie’s characters, alongside a certain mustachioed Belgian sleuth.

Over the past century, the elderly English detective has appeared on screen in numerous TV, radio, theatre and film adaptations – with a brand new series on the way from the makers of Big Little Lies! Over 92 years since the character of Miss Marple made her debut, one mystery remains…

Joan hickson the murder at the vicarage