Hugh Fraser has spent a career being the decent, well-bred Englishman: Hastings, Wellington, Eden. He is reliable, unshowy and good company, and the best of him is in the parts where nobody asks him to be clever.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Captain Hastings arrive at a conclusion. He gets there late, often by accident, and he is so pleased with himself that it would be churlish to point out he has misread the whole thing. Then Poirot takes the one useful scrap in it and goes to work. Fraser played Hastings opposite David Suchet in Agatha Christie's Poirot from 1989 to 2001, came back for the 2013 run, and made 43 episodes of a man whose chief gift is being wrong in a way that helps. Clive Exton's scripts gave the character more humour and more shape than Christie ever bothered with, and Fraser took the gift and never overplayed it.
The pattern was set earlier. Fraser's screen break was Anthony Eden in Edward & Mrs Simpson (1978), and after that the casting directors knew what he was for: the upper-class Englishman, the officer, the man who went to the right school. In The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) he is Mr Talmann, one of the household in Peter Greenaway's country-house puzzle. We scored it 82 and our review does not single him out, which in a film where every person is a figure placed in a composition is not a complaint. In 101 Dalmatians (1996) he is Frederick, one of the humans we found dull next to Glenn Close; the film's fault, not his, and we gave it 54. From 1994 he replaced David Troughton as the Duke of Wellington across nine Sharpe films, the fixed point of authority that Sean Bean's sergeant-turned-officer keeps having to answer to.
What works is the rapport. Fraser is a team actor, and the Poirot set was a team; the long double act with Suchet is the thing people remember, and rightly. We have sat through a Hastings blunder more than once and found ourselves fond of him rather than impatient, because Fraser plays the decency straight and lets the slowness be funny on its own. His own account of the character is the fairest one: "He is not the sharpest tool in the box although he will occasionally, by mistake, come up with a connection between events which Poirot will capitalise on." What does not work is absence. The later series cut Hastings back as the producers chased fidelity to novels he is barely in, and the programme was colder for it.
Since then there has been audiobook narration of Christie, where his clear, separate voices for each character earn their keep, theatre direction including at RADA, and from the mid-2010s crime novels of his own. After forty years of standing next to detectives and getting it wrong, writing the murders himself seems only fair.
Biography
Hugh Fraser (born 23 October 1945) is an English actor, theatre director and author. He trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
His first major television role was as Anthony Eden in the 1978 series Edward & Mrs. Simpson. He is best known for playing Captain Arthur Hastings opposite David Suchet in Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989–2013) and the Duke of Wellington in the Sharpe series. Film credits include Mr Talmann in The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), alongside roles in The Duellists (1977), Firefox (1982), Patriot Games (1992) and 101 Dalmatians (1996).
Fraser has also written crime fiction and narrated audiobooks of Agatha Christie novels. He has been married to actress Belinda Lang since 1988.
