the times | Tuesday May 24 2022 49
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Westminster Abbey organist
and master of the choristers
Simon Preston
Page 50a Shakespeare scholar, she always
played a key role in Millar’s critiques and
film-making. They had five children, all
of whom survive him: James, a TV di-
rector and producer; Thomas, the head
of section for democracy at the Euro-
pean Commission; Duncan, who works
in international development; Kirstie,
who works at a teachers’ trade union;
and Isabel, a philosopher and academic.
In 1963 the BBC offered Millar a job
working on That Was the Week That
Wa s, the satirical current affairs show.
By 1966 he was directing music and arts
programmes and, a decade later,
writing, producing and directing for the
BBC’s Arena Cinema, where he inter-
viewed veteran directors such as
Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, François
Truffaut and his hero Fellini.
Some of Millar’s most highly regarded
work in the 1970s was in arts journalism.
He was the lead film critic for The
Listener and a frequent contributor to
the BFI’s Sight & Sound and the London
Review of Books, where his exacting
critical analysis garnered respect with-
in the film establishment. In 1968 he
revised and edited one of the definitive
handbooks on film-making, The Tech-
nique of Film Editing, originally written
by the director Karel Reisz in 1953.
Such was Millar’s reputation that he
was parodied in the second series of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, in
which John Cleese played “Gavin
Millaaarrrrr”, an intellectual and
obnoxious theatre critic who talks
loudly in restaurants. The irony was
that Millar was in reality a diffident,
left-wing Scot from a working-class
background who Dame Judi DenchMillar directing Amelia Shankley in Dreamchild (1985) and, right, Michael Hordern, Michael Maloney and Denholm Elliott in
Scoop (1987), for which Millar encouraged improvisation. Below: Julie Walters and Victoria Wood in 1994’s Pat and Margaretonce said was “the nicest director I’ve
ever worked with”.
As a critic he was alive to the delicate,
granular detail of the cinema — fea-
tures which would inform his directing
later on — and the technological turn
towards colourising black-and-white
films in the 1980s was anathema to his
aesthetic principles, provoking a rare
flash of bitterness. “What colour were
Rudolph Valentino’s eyes? Humphrey
Bogart’s hats?” he wrote in an article for
The Daily Telegraph in 1986. “It doesn’t
occur to the image-breakers that black-
and-white films were designed,
dressed, made-up, lit and photo-
graphed not just for black and white,
but for every shifting, shining, lustrous,
glancing, spooky, dazzling, haunting
tint of grey in between.”
Alongside Potter, Millar’s favourite
TV writer was Alan Bennett. In 1982 he
directed Bennett’s TV drama Intensive
Care, in which Bennett played a 39-
year-old teacher who had a one-night
stand with a nurse (Julie Walters) while
visiting his father on his deathbed.
Walters later played a murderer’s
wife in another Millar-directed mono-
logue written by Bennett in his second
series of Talking Heads (1998). She also
starred in Pat and Margaret, which
Millar directed in 1994 for the BBC and
which was written by Victoria Wood,
whose Bafta-winning TV show House-
wife, 49 Millar also directed in 2006.
Two years after Scoop, Millar directed
an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Danny, the
Champion of the World. The film starred
Jeremy Irons alongside Irons’s 11-year-
old son Sam, his 78-year-old father-in-
law Cyril Cusack, and 200 Oxfordshire
pheasants. “The only difficulty,” Irons
said, “is that the director is the father
figure on a film set, and yet one some-
times has to usurp his role and offer ad-
vice and instruction to one’s own child.”
After long shoots Millar would re-
treat with his wife to their dilapidated
cottage in Gloucestershire, there to in-
dulge in jazz, opera and good wine. He
lived as archaic a life as any character
from a Bennett or Potter work; with no
hot water or electricity they bathed in a
tin bath, fetched water from a well and
moved by the light of a lantern.
After his wife died in 2012, Millar
became more withdrawn and in his
later years could be seen ambling
around Hackney, east London, in his
old filming fleece and beaten-up
Converse trainers, appearing just as
unkempt as he had years before on set.Gavin Millar, critic and director, was born
on January 11, 1938. He died of a brain
tumour on April 20, 2022, aged 84Obituaries
Gavin Millar
Easygoing director of television plays who worked with Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett and resisted the lure of Hollywood
ALAMY; ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK; MARK LAWRENCE/BBC“h i stdirectorI’vebecome part of your cinematic
language. And I suppose you absorb the
things that please or move you most.”
After the wide acclaim of Dreamchild,
Millar received lucrative offers from
Hollywood including, much to his
amusement, a Christmas special on
Dolly Parton. But the projects that he
found inspiring tended to be British and
European, so he politely turned them
down. “If you are hot one week, you get
hit with lots of scripts,” he said. “Then
you are finished. Perhaps I should have
swallowed my pride and made some-
thing silly.”
Gavin Osborne Millar was born in
1938 in a tenement on Clydebank, Glas-
gow, to Tom and Rita (née Osborne).
Both worked at the local Singer sewing
factory. When the family moved to
Birmingham and his father became a
bookkeeper, the nine-year-old Gavin
won a scholarship to the local grammar
school, King Edward’s.
After serving in the Royal Air Force,
Millar studied English at Christ
Church, Oxford. An interest in drama
led to him playing the drunk nobleman
Stephano opposite Melvyn Bragg in
The Tempest, a production that he
described as “justly neglected”. He
later cast Bragg in a student film
called All Together Boys as a young
man in a black T-shirt “wandering
around town looking incredibly
significant”.
Another fruitful relationship was
forged with a fellow Shakespeare
aficionado, Sylvia Lane, who had
mesmerised Millar in a student pro-
duction of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. They married in 1966 and, asGavin Millar had a laid-back, hands-off
approach to directing and often
appeared dishevelled on set, lounging
in a wicker chair in crumpled clothes,
with a mop of tousled hair. And yet,
according to William Boyd, who wrote
the screenplay for Millar’s ITV
adaptation of Scoop in 1987, he would
always have the cast “eating out the
palm of his hand”.
“Every director wants to do an
Evelyn Waugh,” Millar reckoned. “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.”
The actors for that production, who
included Denholm Elliott and Herbert
Lom, responded well to this understated
method, even when a train full of them
got stuck in the searing heat of the
Moroccan desert for a day and Millar,
recognising the comic potential of the
moment, asked them to improvise, with
the cameras rolling.
It probably helped to reassure the
actors that Bill Deedes, the editor of
The Daily Telegraph who was by then in
his seventies, had been invited on to the
set by Millar and had confirmed that
not only were all the period details
accurate but also the comic situations.
The novel’s hapless journalist hero,
William Boot, played by Michael
Maloney, had been based on the young
Deedes, who had covered the war in
Abyssinia in 1935 with Waugh.
Millar’s break had come seven years
earlier, when he had directed Dennis
Potter’s television play Cream in My
Coffee, starring Peggy Ashcroft. It had
won Europe’s most celebrated award,
the Prix Italia, and Potter had recognised
in the fledgling film-maker a keen
appreciation for the language of cinema.
When Potter was looking for a director
for his equally ambitious screenplay
Dreamchild (1985), a fictionalised
account of the girl who inspired Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonder-
land, Potter turned again to Millar, as
someone who understood the moral
complexity of Carroll’s infatuation with
the girl and the absurdity of the world
that spawned from it.
Critics praised the poignant close-
ups — Carroll’s blushing embarrass-
ment and Alice’s wide-eyed innocence
— and Millar’s canny use of drawn-out
silences and ambiguous innu-
endos.
“I don’t think there is any
question but that [Carroll]
was in love with Alice,” Millar
said, “and in every possible
sexual way, but without any
physical contact... He turned
all that passion and emotion
into his books, and what she fi-
nally grasps is that, whatever the
source of that love, it had been
expressed in a beautiful man-
ner.” For the dream sequences,
in which an older Alice is
Monty Python parodied
him as obnoxious but he
was well-liked by actors
haunted by nightmares featuring Car-
roll, Millar used gruesome puppets
created by Jim Henson and a novel
technique known as animatronics. He
insisted that the designers worked from
the original book illustrations by John
Tenniel to make it “as fierce as we felt an
old lady’s nightmares would have made
them”. Stanley Kubrick commended
the film for appearing much more high-
budget than it actually was.
Though not one for conscious imita-
tion, Millar acknowledged how influ-
enced he had been by Federico Fellini,
especially his still frames, “where one
thing is moving, like the father with the
crumbs on the kitchen table”, he said.
“Things like that stay with you, and