David Suchet, CBE (/ˈsuːʃeɪ/ SOO-shay; born 2 May 1946) is an English actor, known for his work on British stage and television. He played Edward Teller in the TV serial Oppenheimer and received the RTS and BPG awards for his performance as Augustus Melmotte in the 2001 British serial The Way We Live Now. For his role as Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Poirot, he received a 1991 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nomination.

Biography

Family
In 1972, Suchet first met his wife, Sheila Ferris, at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, where they were both working; he says that he fell in love with her as soon as he saw her, and that it took a while to persuade her to go out for a meal with him. They were married on 30 June 1976; the couple have a son, Robert (b. 1981), a captain in the Royal Marines, and a daughter, Katherine (b. 1983), a physiotherapist.

Suchet is the brother of John Suchet, a national news presenter for Five News and Breakfast Show Presenter on Classic FM (January 2011). He is the uncle of broadcaster Richard Suchet, who is the son of Suchet's youngest brother, Peter.

Suchet's maternal grandfather, James Jarché, was a famous Fleet Street photographer notable for the first pictures of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson and also for his pictures of Louis Blériot (1909) and the Siege of Sidney Street. Suchet first became interested in photography when his grandfather gave him a Kodak camera as a present. The Jarché family was originally named Jarchy, and were Russian Jews.

Suchet's paternal grandfather, Lithuanian Jew Isidor Shokhet (shochet means "kosher butcher" in Yiddish; derived from Hebrew), lived in Kretinga, a Lithuanian city in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (until 1791 in Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; now in Lithuania). After escaping persecution to located 16 mi (26 km) away Memel in German Empire, Isidor changed his surname to the still Yiddish, but Germanized with a Slavic twist, Suchedowitz, where Suched+o+witz resembles the Polish name (Slavic) construction structure of [root]+wicz with o in between when the last letter of the root is d, t, h, n, etc., e.g. Janowicz=Jan+o+wicz, made German-/Yiddish-like by replacing "cz" with "tz", e.g. Janowitz; also suche means "dry" in Polish), and then to Suchet after moving to Cape Town, South Africa.

Suchet's maternal grandmother's great-grandfather, George Jezzard, was a master mariner. He was captain of the brig Hannah, which foundered nine miles off the coast of Suffolk during a terrible storm on 28 May 1860, in which more than 100 vessels and at least 40 lives were lost. Jezzard and six others of his crew were saved by local rescuers just before their ship sank.


Religious beliefs
Raised without religion, in 1986, Suchet underwent a religious conversion after reading Romans 8 in a hotel Bible; soon afterwards, he was baptised into the Church of England. Suchet stated in an interview with Strand Magazine, "I'm a Christian by faith. I like to think it sees me through a great deal of my life. I very much believe in the principles of Christianity and the principles of most religions, actually—that one has to abandon oneself to a higher good." In 2012, Suchet made a documentary for the BBC on his personal hero, Saint Paul, to discover what he was like as a man by charting his evangelistic journey around the Mediterranean. Two years later, he would film another documentary, this time on the apostle Saint Peter.

On 22 November 2012, the British Bible Society announced the appointment of David Suchet and Dr Paula Gooder as new vice-presidents. They joined the existing vice-presidents: John Sentamu (Archbishop of York), Vincent Nichols (Archbishop of Westminster), Barry Morgan (Archbishop of Wales), David F. Ford (Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge), Joel Edwards (International Director of Micah Challenge) and Lord Alton of Liverpool. Following the time when he bade farewell to his role as Hercule Poirot, Suchet fulfilled a 27-year ambition to make an audio recording of The Bible's New International Version, which was released on 24 April 2014.


Political views
In August 2014, Suchet was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.