Agatha Christie was born as
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in
Torquay, Devon, to an
American father and an
English mother. She never claimed
United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Boehmer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879–1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880–1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.
Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to
Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the
Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter,
Rosalind Hicks, and divorced in
1928.
During
World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, a job that influenced her work; many of the murders in her books are carried out with
poison. (See also
cyanide, ricin, and
thallium.)
On
8 December 1926, while living in
Sunningdale in
Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing great interest in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit in
Newland's Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found staying at the Swan Hydro (now the Old Swan hotel) in
Harrogate under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair. She claimed to have suffered a
nervous breakdown and a
fugue state caused by the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a
publicity stunt. Public sentiment at the time was negative, with many feeling that an alleged publicity stunt had cost the taxpayers a substantial amount of money. A
1979 film,
Agatha, starring
Vanessa Redgrave as Christie, recounted a fictionalised version of the disappearance. Other media accounts of this event exist; it was featured on a segment of
Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, for example.
In 1930, Christie married a
Roman Catholic (despite her divorce and her
Anglican faith), the
archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years younger than Christie, and his travels with her contributed background to several of her novels set in the
Middle East. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's many affairs in later life, notably with
Barbara Parker, whom he married in 1977, the year after Christie's death. Other novels (such as
And Then There Were None) were set in and around
Torquay, Devon, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel,
Murder on the Orient Express was written in the
Pera Palas hotel in
Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railroad. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The
Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the
National Trust. Christie often stayed at
Abney Hall in Cheshire, which was owned by her brother-in-law, James Watts. She based at least two of her stories on the hall: The short story
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding which is in the
story collection of the same name and the novel
After the Funeral. "Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for country-house life, with all the servants and grandeur which have been woven into her plots. The descriptions of the fictional Styles, Chimneys, Stoneygates and the other houses in her stories are mostly Abney in various forms."
In 1971 she was made a
Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Agatha Christie died on
12 January 1976, at age 85, from natural causes, at
Winterbrook House in the north of
Cholsey parish, adjoining
Wallingford in
Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). She is buried in the nearby St Mary's Churchyard in Cholsey.
Christie's only child, Rosalind Hicks, died on
28 October 2004, also aged 85, from natural causes. Christie's grandson,
Mathew Pritchard, was heir to the copyright to some of his grandmother's literary work (including
The Mousetrap) and is still associated with Agatha Christie Limited.
