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.