Gavin Millar
Director who ranged from Bennett and Potter TV plays to films like Danny the Champion of the World
GAVIN MILLAR, who has died aged 84, was a film critic and documentary maker before taking the director’s chair and focusing his craftsman’s eye on period feature films and much-applauded television plays by Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter.
Millar also fronted film programmes for television in the BBC’S Arena and
Talking Pictures strands. As well as interviewing Hollywood stars such as Gene Wilder and Shirley Maclaine, he profiled celebrated European directors including the French filmmaker René Clair and the Italian auteur Federico Fellini, the subject of his Omnibus film for the BBC in 1987. He also interviewed the veteran American director Howard Hawks on the eve of his 80th birthday.
Notable among Millar’s own feature films was his assured directorial debut
Dreamchild (1985), from a script by Dennis Potter. It featured Coral Browne as the aged widow Alice Liddell, who as a young girl in Victorian Oxford had been the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, recalling her intense childhood relationship with the Rev Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (played by Ian Holm).
“I don’t think there is any question but that [Dodgson] was in love with Alice,” Millar reflected, “and in every possible sexual way, but without any physical contact… He turned all that passion and emotion into his books, and what she finally grasps is that, whatever the source of that love, it had been expressed in a beautiful manner.” For the dream sequences Millar used menacing Muppet-like creatures (made in London by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop), employing the technique known as animatronics.
He followed this with a television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic Fleet Street satire Scoop (ITV, 1987), an ambitious £1½ million production which was nearly abandoned because technicians would not accept the use of a freelance director of photography.
Millar invited the Telegraph’s then editor, Bill Deedes, the model for Waugh’s journalist anti-hero William Boot, to visit the location shoot in southern Morocco, more than half a century after Deedes, then 22, had been dispatched to Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) alongside Waugh to cover the war with Italy in 1935. With a stellar cast headed by Michael Maloney as Boot, Sir Michael Hordern as his tweedy Uncle Theodore, and Denholm Elliott as the reluctant foreign editor Salter, Millar’s film was widely praised by critics.
Fleet Street in general was less enthusiastic, however, perhaps because (as one hack pointed out) their well-thumbed copies of Scoop ranked alongside Essential Law for Journalists and Roget’s Thesaurus as their three sole pillars of wisdom.
“Every director wants to do an Evelyn Waugh,” Millar told one interviewer. “He’s probably the 20th century’s best English comic novelist. But the situations and characters in
Scoop are so bizarre that one has to play them down. I just tell the actors to be, not to act and not to be comic, because the comedy is supplied by Mr Waugh.”
Another of Millar’s period pieces was the turn-of-the-century drama Belle Epoque (1995), a $15 million miniseries made in France in French for French television. With Kristin Scott-thomas heading an international cast, Millar tackled “hair-raising” problems with the script by François Truffaut and Jean Gruault, in Truffaut’s case delivered posthumously.
Gavin Osborne Millar was born on January 11 1938 in a tenement at Clydebank, near Glasgow, where both his parents were employed at the Singer sewing machine factory. When he was nine, the family moved to the Midlands and he won a scholarship to King Edward’s School, Birmingham.
After National Service in the RAF, he read English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he met his contemporary Melvyn Bragg, casting him in a student film called All Together Boys as a young man in a black shirt “wandering around the town and looking incredibly significant”. After Oxford, Millar enrolled on a postgraduate film course at the Slade School of Art under the director Thorold Dickinson.
When the BBC offered Millar a job in television in 1963, he worked on the satirical Saturday-night fixture That Was the Week That Was and the current affairs show Tonight. From 1966 he directed music and arts programmes and wrote book reviews.
Millar also contributed a new section to the 1968 edition of the director Karel Reisz’s seminal book The Technique of Film Editing,
originally published in 1953, and covering developments in cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. He started reviewing for Sight And Sound
magazine and between 1970 and 1984 was film critic of The Listener.
He also presented or directed film programmes including The First Picture Show, Talking Pictures and the Arena Cinema strands, assignments that introduced him to many leading figures in world cinema, including Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, Truffaut, Jean-luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Another influential figure was the scriptwriter Dennis Potter, whose television play Cream in My Coffee
Millar directed for ITV in 1980. Filmed in Eastbourne on a tight shooting schedule of 22 days with Lionel Jeffries and Peggy Ashcroft as an unhappily married couple revisiting the scene of a long-ago assignation, the drama won the Prix Italia, Europe’s most prestigious television award.
For Play For Today Millar also directed Alan Bennett’s Intensive Care (BBC, 1982) as well as The Outside Dog, one of his monologues in the second series of Talking Heads (1998), in which Julie Walters played the wife of a suspected murderer.
Among Millar’s most popular television projects were his collaborations with the comedienne Victoria Wood: Pat and Margaret (BBC, 1994), acclaimed as one of her character-led television gems by the
Telegraph, with Wood and Walters as estranged sisters reunited after 27 years for a TV show, and the moving wartime drama Housewife, 49 (ITV, 2006), which earned a Best Single Drama Bafta and Best Actress award for Victoria Wood.
As well as Dreamchild, Millar directed two further films for the big screen: Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World (1989), starring Jeremy Irons and his 11-year-old son Samuel, and, following Millar’s four-part television version of Iain Banks’s The Crow Road (BBC, 1996), an adaptation of Banks’s thriller
Complicity (2000).
Millar also directed Denholm Elliott as John le Carré’s spy hero George Smiley in A Murder of Quality (ITV, 1991), as well as episodes of The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (ITV, 1996) and
Foyle’s War (ITV, 2004-07), a popular TV detective drama series set in Britain during the Second World War. His final feature film, Albert Schweitzer (2009), starred Jeroen Krabbé as the philosopher and physician in a biopic about his anti-nuclear campaigning in the Cold War era.
A gentle, modest, humane and witty man, Millar usually avoided controversy. But in an article for the
Telegraph in 1986 he railed against American computer technology which would allow for the colourisation of old black and white films. “What colour were Rudolph Valentino’s eyes? Humphrey Bogart’s hats? What colour is the rosebud on Charles Foster Kane’s sledge? Well, black and white of course. But not for long, if a group of ingenious but heedless iconoclasts have their way with the old classics,” he warned.
“But of course it’s more than just seeing your favourite stars with the wrong colour lipstick. The bastardising colour process assumes that black-andwhite was not merely a technical necessity, it was an artistic drawback. It doesn’t occur to the image-breakers that black-and-white films were designed, dressed, made-up, lit and photographed not just for black and white, but for every shifting, shining, lustrous, glancing, spooky, dazzling, haunting tint of grey in between.”
Gavin Millar married, in 1966, Sylvia Lane, whom he had seen in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Oxford. She predeceased him in 2012; their three sons and two daughters survive him.
Gavin Millar, born January 11 1938, died April 20 2022