Jenny Seagrove

English Missionary, Miss Beatty (Jenny Seagrove), comes to Victorian India to rescue orphan children and convert them to Christianity.

A young couple with a newborn son don't realize that their new nanny is a magical Druid sacrificing infants to an evil tree. Phil and Kate have a baby boy named Jake. They hire a baby-sitter, Camilla, to look after Jake and she becomes part of the family. The Sterling's friend and neighbor, Ned, takes a liking to Camilla and asks her out. She refuses, but Ned follows her and discovers that she is not quite human. Camilla discovers that she has been followed and Ned is pursued. He leaves a desperate message for Phil and Kate which reveals that Camilla has special plans for baby Jake.

When a former prison wardress who dominates the lives of her three adult stepchildren and her daughter is found dead at an archaeological dig near the Dead Sea, there are a great many suspects. Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie), stepmother to the three Boynton children, and mother to Ginevra (Amber Bezer), blackmails the family lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul), into destroying the second will of her late husband, which would have freed the children from her dominating influence. She takes herself and the children on vacation to Europe and the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, Hercule Poirot (Sir Peter Ustinov) meets up with a woman friend, Dr. Sarah King (Jenny Seagrove), who falls in love with Raymond Boynton (John Terleskey) to Emily's disapproval. Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall), her secretary, and Cope are following them too. The children learn about the second will, and Emily succeeds in rubbing the rest the wrong way, causing much hatred toward her. At a dig, everybody wonders about the camp, and Emily is found dead, poisoned. Poirot investigates. —Lee Horton <Leeh@tcp.co.uk> When Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is found dead at an archaeological dig near the Dead Sea, there are a great many suspects. Boynton is a harridan, a former prison wardress who dominates the lives of her three adult stepchildren and her daughter. She is loud and rude, much to the dislike of Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall), a transplanted American Anglophile, and member of the British government, and Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills), the archaeologist in charge of the dig. Also present is Jefferson Cope (David Soul), the family attorney who she blackmailed into destroying her late husband's most recent will, thereby ensuring she would inherit everything. By the time of her death, Hercule Poirot (Sir Peter Ustinov) has been travelling with this group for several days, and already knows a good deal about them. He is more than happy to accept a request from his friend, Colonel Carbury (Sir John Gielgud), to assist the authorities in their investigation. —garykmcd 1938. A disparate group of travellers become acquainted during a Mediterranean cruise to the Holy Land and during what ends up being their extended stay there. They include: controlling American-born Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall), a British Member of Parliament on an unofficial inspection of Palestine; Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills), Lady Westholme's secretary and a budding archaeologist; Dr. Sarah King (Jenny Seagrove), a newly minted physician also from Britain; and the American Boynton family and their lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul). The Boynton family matriarch, Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie), is recently widowed and blackmailed Cope into executing an earlier will that left all of her husband's substantial estate to her, rather than the last will he wrote which divided the estate equally between his four adult children, only the youngest Ginevra (Amber Bezer) being Emily's biological daughter. The offspring are all aware that there is another will that left the estate to them but cannot prove it, leaving them under Emily's strict and self-serving control. Oldest offspring Lennox Boyton's (Nicholas Guest's) wife, Nadine Boynton (Carrie Fisher), is secretly or not so secretly having an affair with Cope. And second oldest son, Raymond Boynton (John Terlesky), is immediately attracted to Dr. King, his pursuit of her which may not sit well with his stepmother. The stay of this collective in Jerusalem is extended due to one of them being murdered there, the murder which was staged to look like an accidental death. Beyond Colonel Carbury (Sir John Gielgud), who is stationed in Palestine for the British government, another of the travellers on vacation is asked to lead the investigation, namely famed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (Sir Peter Ustinov). In the course of the investigation, Poirot finds that most of the others within this collective would have had the opportunity and motive to commit the murder, he having to dig a little deeper below the surface and undercover the context to some of the deceased's comments to discover the identity of the murderer. —Huggo Long Island, 1937. Emily Boynton has, under dubious circumstances, just inherited her late husband's vast fortune, much to the dismay and suspicion of her child and step-children. To ease the tension she takes them on a holiday to Europe and the Holy Land. In Trieste they meet the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and end up on the same ship as him, heading for the Holy Land. Ms Boynton rules the family with an iron fist and it is clear that she is not like by any of her children, step-children or children-in-law, all of whom stand to inherit vast amounts upon her death. Poirot suspects that the murder of Ms Boynton is imminent. —grantss