Amazing Facts About Agatha Christie's Life
On September 15, 1890, Agatha Miller was born in the British county of Devon. Today we know her as a detective genius, one of the most popular authors of the 20th century, Agatha Christie. Her life was full of contradictory and extraordinary episodes, many of which were embodied in the writer's stories.
We invite you to recall the brightest moments from her life and work.
As often happens with talented people, Agatha suffered from dysgraphia - the inability to write down text. All her works were dictated.
The reason for writing Agatha Christie's first novel was an argument with her sister, who was a writer. An argument about whether she could do something more worthwhile than her sister.
Initially, Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan, née Miller, was going to publish under the pseudonym Martin West or Martin Gray, believing that a female name for a detective story author might cause some prejudice among readers; later, she decided to keep her real name and the surname of her first husband, Christie.
During World War I, Agatha Christie worked as a nurse in a military hospital, then she got a job in a pharmacy, thanks to which she became well versed in poisonous substances. Perhaps this is why poisoning is so common in her detective stories.
1926 was one of the most difficult years in Christie's life, and it was then that she mysteriously disappeared. Her mother died, her brother became a confirmed drug addict, the publishers did not like the novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", in which the story was told from the point of view of the killer, and to top it all off, her husband Archibald fell in love with another woman and demanded a divorce. After that, Agatha disappeared, they searched for her for a long time and even turned to another British master of detectives - Arthur Conan Doyle for help.
After some time, Agatha was found in a small sanatorium town, where she introduced herself to everyone as Teresa Neel. Her memory was severely damaged: she vaguely remembered her husband, could not remember her daughter's name, and recognized her own sister only a few days later.
Some believed that the writer deliberately staged the situation with her “disappearance” in order to take revenge on her husband.
Brian Aldiss, an acquaintance of Agatha Christie, once described her methods: “She would write a book to the last chapter, then choose the least likely suspect and, going back to the beginning, change some moments to set him up.”
According to Christie, from childhood until old age she had the same dream: a man with chopped-off arms and a scary face. She called him the Killer Man, although in her dreams he never killed anyone.
During World War II, Agatha Christie wrote two stories, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, which were to be the last books about Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, her two most popular characters. At Agatha Christie's request, both books were hidden in a bank vault and were to be published when Agatha Christie was no longer able to write.
The stories were published in 1974, when the writer was 84 years old...
The film "Murder on the Orient Express" was the only screen adaptation of the writer's works that Agatha Christie was completely satisfied with. In particular, she said that Albert Finney's performance as Hercule Poirot was the closest to the literary character she created. Agatha Christie traveled a lot, and the novel on which this film is based was written in Istanbul, where the writer came on holiday with her husband.
Agatha Christie was married twice, with her first husband she gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind. The second time she married quite late, and her husband was fifteen years younger than her. He was an archaeologist, and Agatha often joked that an archaeologist's wife should be much older than her husband to interest him.
Her books have been published in over two billion copies and translated into 103 languages. Agatha Christie has become one of the symbols of Great Britain, her masterpieces are the most published after the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
Agatha Christie also holds the record for the greatest number of theatrical productions of a work, and her play Mousetrap was first performed in 1952 and is still continuously shown on the London stage.
Agatha Christie is the author of many great quotes, the most famous of which was: "Freedom is worth fighting for."