GAVIN MILLAR
(11 January 1938 – 20 April 2022)
The Scottish-born film and television director Gavin Millar was also an arts journalist, film critic and presenter. Millar, who has died aged 84 from a brain tumour, was the son of Tom and Rita Millar, both of whom worked for the Singer sewing machine factory. The family left Glasgow when Gavin was nine and he continued his education at King Edward's School in Birmingham. Following his National Service in the RAF he read English at Christ Church College in Oxford and then did a postgraduate film course at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. From 1970 until 1984 he was the film critic for the BBC weekly publication The Listener, as well as contributing to the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine and the London Review of Books. He was responsible for writing, producing and presenting the BBC’s Arena Cinema series while also making other arts documentaries for television such as the film programme Release, The Impresarios, about theatre directors, Music on 2, and the general arts series Review.
Between 1980 and 2006, he directed some twenty-five full-length television dramas beginning with Dennis Potter's Cream in My Coffee, the last in a trio of plays about youth and old age, and the language of love and betrayal. It starred Peggy Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries. Millar found it much easier to direct television drama, if only because he was offered projects he liked and was grateful to do them. His experience with trying to set up cinema film projects often came to nought. As he said: "It's just that sometimes you spend so long trying to set up a feature film. You work on it for three or four years and then you go to the States and you pitch it for two or three months. You think you have got a cast together, you think you have got the locations, and then the money disappears at the last minute. That is depressing and demoralizing... I have had my bellyful of it."
Some of Gavin Millar's television movies could easily have been made as feature films because many belie their origins in TV. For instance, Weather in the Streets from 1983 was based on Rosamund Lehmann's novel about a young man in an unhappy marriage meeting a previous lover. It starred Michael York, Lisa Eichhorn and Joanna Lumley. Noel Coward's story Star Quality: Mr and Mrs Edgehill (1985) starred Ian Holm and Judi Dench, while Scoop (1987) was an adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel about a wartime reporter with Michael Maloney and Michael Hordern. In a previous age all three would probably have been made by the likes of British Lion, Ealing Studios or London Films. But then British television became the main producers of filmed drama.
However, Millar managed to direct more prime quality television productions such as John Le Carré’s A Murder of Quality (1991) with Denholm Elliott as George Smiley opposite co-stars Joss Ackland, Glenda Jackson, Billie Whitelaw and Christian Bale. Later on he made Sex and Chocolate with Dawn French and Phil Daniels, This Could Be the Last Time with Joan Plowright, Penelope Wilton, Dorothy Tutin and Keith Barron, and Housewife, 49 (2006) Victoria Wood's screenplay about Nella Last, a woman who contributed information to Mass Observation during World War II. It won Bafta Awards for Victoria Wood's screenplay and also for her best actress performance.
Millar had also directed Pat and Margaret (1994), written by Victoria Wood and with Wood herself and Julie Walters as two sisters meeting up on a TV family reunion show after a long separation, only to find they are completely incompatible. It was produced by the BBC after London Weekend Television turned it down, calling it a 'sketch' and not a film. It won a Broadcasting Press Guild award and three prizes at the Reims TV Festival as well as securing two Bafta nominations. Among the many other television programmes that Millar directed was The Outside Dog (1998), an episode in the second series of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, with Julie Walters.
Gavin Millar's first major cinema film was Dreamchild in 1985. Written by Dennis Potter it featured Ian Holm as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the relationship he (real name Charles Dodgson) had with a young girl, Alice Liddell, his model for the Alice stories. Coral Browne played the aged Alice looking back at her childhood. Miss Browne won for best actress at the Evening Standard British Film Awards. Millar's next feature film was Danny, the Champion of the World (1989), made for TV but released in cinemas. It was based on the Roald Dahl story about a father and son preventing the sale of their land by poaching the would-be buyer's game pheasants. It starred Jeremy Irons with his own son, Samuel Irons, as Danny.
Complicity (2000, aka Retribution in the US) was based on Iain Banks' novel with Johnny Lee Miller as a Scottish journalist writing about corruption in powerful business concerns. Things get hairy as trouble brews when the people he mentions become murder victims. The film also starred Brian Cox, Keeley Hawes, Bill Paterson and Samuel West. Made for cinema release, apparently the film went straight to video. Millar's last film was Albert Schweitzer (2009) with Jeroen Krabbé as the Christian medical missionary in West Africa and Barbara Hershey as his wife Helene. The screenplay, co-written by James Brabazon, David Howard and Gavin Millar, covers the time when Schweitzer became involved in a smear campaign when asked to speak out against hydrogen bomb tests. This was Gavin Millar's last work for the cinema.
Gavin Millar met his future wife, Sylvia Lane, during his time at the Slade School of Fine Art and they married in 1966. Sylvia died in 2012 and he is survived by their five children, James, Tommy, Duncan, Kirstie and Isabel.
MICHAEL DARVELL