Agatha

Agatha is a 1979 mystery drama set in England in 1926. Agatha Christie, already a successful crime writer, disappears for eleven days shortly after her husband Archie tells her he wants a divorce so he can marry another woman. Her vanishing becomes a newspaper sensation. An American journalist, Wally Stanton, a admirer of her books, sets out to find her, and traces her to a hotel where she has checked in under a different name. As he gets close to her, he has to weigh his pursuit of the story against what he learns about her plans. The film presents one imagined version of what happened during those eleven days, a real episode in the writer's life that was never fully explained.

Michael Apted directed, working from a screenplay by Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft. It was the first of the nineteen films he directed, ahead of Coal Miner's Daughter the following year. Dustin Hoffman plays Stanton and also served as a producer, with Vanessa Redgrave as Christie and Timothy Dalton as Archie. The cast runs to forty-five credited performers, among them Helen Morse, Celia Gregory and Paul Brooke.

Made on a budget of four million dollars, the film took about eight million worldwide, a modest return. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.1 out of 10 from 68 votes.