Miss Lemon

Hercule Poirot
David Suchet as Hercule Poirot
First appearance	The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Last appearance	Curtain
Created by	Agatha Christie
Portrayed by	Charles Laughton Francis L. Sullivan Austin Trevor Orson Welles Harold Huber Richard Williams José Ferrer Martin Gabel Tony Randall Albert Finney Peter Ustinov Ian Holm David Suchet John Moffatt Maurice Denham Peter Sallis Konstantin Raikin Alfred Molina Robert Powell Jason Durr Kenneth Branagh
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Private investigator Police officer (former)
Family	Jules-Louis Poirot (father) Godelieve Poirot (mother)
Religion	Roman Catholic
Nationality	Belgian
Birth date and place	c. 1854-1873 Spa, Wallonia, Belgium
Death date and place	October 1949 Styles Court, Essex, UK

Hercule Poirot (/ɜːrˈkjuːl pwɑːrˈoʊ/; French pronunciation: ​[ɛʁkyl pwaʁo]) is a fictional Belgian detective, created by Agatha Christie. Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels, one play (Black Coffee), and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975.

Poirot has been portrayed on radio, in film and on television by various actors, including Austin Trevor, John Moffatt, Albert Finney, Sir Peter Ustinov, Sir Ian Holm, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina, Orson Welles, Sir Kenneth Branagh and David Suchet.

Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poiret, a retired Belgian police officer living in London.

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography, Christie states, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".