Stella de Zuigder

Stella de Zuigder is a non-canonical character created for the 1995 ITV adaptation of Hercule Poirot's Christmas. She is a young woman living on her own homestead in South Africa. In a flashback to events some 40 years before the main plot, Simeon Lee has just murdered his business partner and has himself been wounded. Riding away from the scene, he collapsed. Stella and her servants found him and tended his wounds. Simeon comes to in Stella's house and the two strike up a relationship. Simeon takes advantage of her, and then abandons her, stealing her things and riding off in the night. The young Stella is portrayed by Liese Benjamin. An older Stella who appears later in the show is portrayed by Olga Lowe.

Later in the story, we see a much older woman moving into an inn near Gorston Hall where the elderly Simeon Lee resides. As Poirot reveals during the denouement, this woman is Stella. She is the mother of Superintendent Sugden, the offspring of her union with Simeon Lee. Stella had egged Sugden on in her scheme of revenge and had moved in nearby to be in at the kill as it were. There is a scene of her being taken to the mortuary where she gloats over Simeon's dead body. When Sugden is denounced as the killer and is despondent about the failure of their plan, she reassures him, telling him that they did well.

While Sugden did have a mother and is the illegitimate son of Simeon Lee in the original novel, the name and backstory of the mother is not mentioned at all and there is no indication that either she or Sugden himself came from South Africa.