Gavin Millar, who has died aged 84 from a mind tumour, was a number one gentle of tv arts journalism of the Sixties and 70s earlier than happening to direct work by Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Victoria Wooden.
His richest movie was Dreamchild (1985), written by Potter, through which the aged Alice Liddell (Coral Browne) displays on her youthful relationship with Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, who used her because the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In addition to shaping complicated performances from Browne in her closing display screen look, and Ian Holm because the squirming, tormented Dodgson, Millar negotiated tonal shifts and ethical ambiguities which may have foxed a much less humane or delicate film-maker.
“I don’t suppose there's any query however that [Dodgson] was in love with Alice,” he stated on the time, “and in each potential sexual means, however with none bodily contact … He turned all that keenness and emotion into his books, and what she lastly grasps is that, regardless of the supply of that love, it had been expressed in a wonderful method.”
The sudden arrival within the grownup Alice’s lifetime of characters from the ebook, rendered by Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop as mangy, menacing puppets, sophisticated the temper nonetheless additional. Millar insisted that the design ought to take the unique John Tenniel illustrations as its start line however that the end result should look “as fierce as we felt an outdated woman’s nightmares would have made them”. Just like the movie itself, the puppets have been “life like and un-whimsical”. That went for Browne’s efficiency; Millar known as Browne “exhausting as nails however stuffed with feeling”.
Dreamchild was extensively acclaimed. Andrew Sarris within the Village Voice known as it “rousing and galvanizing”, and selected it as among the finest movies of the yr.
Millar had beforehand directed an earlier Potter script, Cream in My Espresso, in 1980. That tv drama, which starred Peggy Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries as an unhappily married couple revisiting the scene of an earlier vacation, received the Prix Italia. He directed Bennett’s Intensive Care (1982) in addition to one of many author’s monologues within the second sequence of Speaking Heads (1998), through which Julie Walters performed the spouse of a suspected assassin.
Amongst Millar’s most generally seen works have been his collaborations with Victoria Wooden: Pat and Margaret (1994), with Wooden and Walters as estranged sisters who're reunited for a tv present, and the double Bafta-winning wartime drama Housewife, 49 (2006).
Born in Clydebank, close to Glasgow, Gavin was the son of Rita (nee Osborne) and Tom Millar, who each labored on the native Singer stitching machine manufacturing unit. The household moved to the Midlands when Gavin was 9; he was educated in Birmingham at King Edward’s college. After finishing his nationwide service within the RAF, he studied English at Christ Church, Oxford (1958-61).
There he performed Stefano reverse Melvyn Bragg in a manufacturing of The Tempest that he later described as “justly uncared for”. Whereas on a postgraduate movie course on the Slade Faculty of Advantageous Artwork, London, in 1962, he met Sylvia Lane after seeing her in a pupil manufacturing of A Midsummer Evening’s Dream in Oxford, and so they married in 1966.
Millar started working in tv in 1963 on BBC sequence together with That Was the Week That Was and the present affairs present Tonight. He directed music and humanities programmes from the mid-Sixties, added a piece to the 1968 version of the director Karel Reisz’s ebook The Strategy of Movie Enhancing, and was movie critic of the Listener journal from 1970 to 1984; he additionally introduced or directed movie programmes together with The First Image Present, Speaking Footage and the Enviornment Cinema strand. These documentaries introduced him into contact with most of the towering auteurs of world cinema, together with Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Jean Renoir and François Truffaut.
His ubiquity within the arts panorama led to him turning into a goal for parody. The second sequence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, broadcast in 1970, featured a pompous critic, performed by John Cleese and named “Gavin Millaaarrrrr” – the “R” is absurdly prolonged – who refers to “intelligent individuals like me who speak loudly in eating places”. This was a supply of lasting amusement to Millar and his household. His daughter Isabel stated that the portrayal chimed together with her father’s personal “self-parody of the Oxford mental. As a working-class Scot, he had a sure ironic distance from that ‘posh English’ man that he turned.” The sketch additionally appeared on the 1971 album One other Monty Python Report.
Together with Dreamchild, Millar made two different movies for cinema: a heat, enchanting tackle Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World (1989), starring Jeremy Irons and his 11-year-old son, Samuel, and an adaptation of Iain Banks’s thriller Complicity (2000), which adopted Millar’s acclaimed four-part BBC model of Banks’s The Crow Street (1996). Different notable TV work included Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1987) for London Weekend Tv. Millar received an ACE award for Tidy Endings (1988), based mostly on Harvey Fierstein’s play Protected Intercourse, with Fierstein as a person who befriends his late lover’s widow, performed by Stockard Channing.
He additionally directed Denholm Elliott as John Le Carré’s spy hero George Smiley in A Homicide of High quality (1991) and Kristin Scott Thomas within the three-part drama Belle Époque (1995), in addition to episodes of The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1996) and Foyle’s Conflict (2004-07). His final movie, Albert Schweitzer (2009), starred Jeroen Krabbé because the theologian and doctor in later life.
Sylvia died in 2012, and he's survived by their 5 youngsters, James, Tommy, Duncan, Kirstie and Isabel, and 6 grandchildren, Florence, Martha, Louis, Iris, Arwen and Gavin.
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