It seems appropriate to end this little series of knitting in the movies and television with Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's famous amateur sleuth, one of whose main characteristics is that she is often to be found knitting, and it seems that in the half-dozen-plus films and series featuring Miss Marple over the years, the knitting part has come more and more into play.
I admit that I haven't seen any of Margaret Rutherford's 1960s Miss Marple outings in full, and so I don't really know whether she actually knits much in the films, but I could find only the one image to use in this post. She isn't actually knitting in the second one, obviously, but she is wearing a wonderfully dumpy cardigan as well as a knitted hat, with characteristically Rutherford pompom of course. (Apparently, she insisted in wearing her own clothes to portray Miss Marple!)
Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in a single outing in 1980, so perhaps there was not much time for knitting. I don't see a single image of Helen Hayes as Miss Marple actually knitting, which is a shame — I don't remember her two films, though I must have seen them, so I will certainly make the effort to do so again.
Joan Hickson played Miss Marple in the late 1980s and early 90s for the first television series, one that remains firmly in the consciousness of many viewers as the definitive Marple.
The production values and attention to detail for Geraldine McEwan's tenure as Miss Marple in "Agatha Christie's Marple" were high enough that she was often shown knitting, although I will not be the first to say, nor the last I'm sure, that for a series called "Agatha Christie's Marple" it strayed rather far from the original at times. I am still hoping that McEwan was simply doing what the director asked for.
Julia McKenzie took over from McEwan after the latter's retirement, and I must say that she fits my mental image of Miss Marple rather more (I won't say "better" because I admire McEwan tremendously) — and of course I love the fact that pictures of her knitting in the series abound!
Bonus — slightly out of order, but how could I not end with this? —
Miss Marple herself wearing a classic keyhole scarf. Free patterns are available for Skiff's Miss Marple Scarf here, and another one here by SusanneS-vV, and an actual 1948 one here from The Sunny Stitcher. Just for fun, here's a faux-fox version. I knitted mine up — in two days! — in some of the late and much-lamented Jaeger Extrafine Merino left over from my Pearl Buck Swing Jacket, in the beautiful elderberry shade 944 (about 80g).














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