THE great Scottish actor Roddy McMillan once had a role in a western, Chato’s Land, which was filmed in the south of Spain. The film, directed by Michael Winner, starred Charles Bronson and Jack Palance.
During the shooting, McMillan and visiting journalist David Gibson mastered, the latter wrote, “the art of sitting in absolute silence at a roadside cafe, just watching the world go by”.
“You can learn a lot just watching, sonny”, McMillan told him on that first morning. And after that, Gibson added, “we just sat and looked. He was a man who had learned a lot by looking”.
Gibson recalled the encounter in July 1979, when McMillan passed away, aged just 56, a mere matter of weeks after he had been awarded an OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours.
McMillan was best-known, perhaps, for his role as Para Handy in The Vital Spark (seen here in this BBC picture with John Grieve, Walter Carr and Alex McAvoy) but his range extended far and wide: he also played a Chandleresque Glasgow private eye in The View from Daniel Pike, written by Edward Boyd, as well as Detective Inspector ‘Choc’ Minty in the series, Hazell.
He also acted in, and wrote for, the stage: two of his own plays were All in Good Faith, and The Bevellers (pictured here by the Herald’s Arthur Kinloch), the latter based on his days as an apprentice in a glass-mirror works, and which was screened in the BBC’s Play for Today slot in November 1974.
His CV also included a role in the 1950 film,The Gorbals Story, in which Johnnie, a successful artist, remembers, in flashbacks, his life in the Gorbals. The script was adapted from a 1946 Robert McLeish play staged by Glasgow’s Unity Theatre, where McMillan himself once acted.
The Herald, reporting McMillan’s death, noted that an influence on his career had been the actor, Duncan Macrae. When working as a schoolteacher, Macrae had taught the young McMillan, and had remained his mentor through early days at the Unity Theatre and the Citizens Theatre.
In the first episodes of the BBC Scotland series, McMillan played first mate to Macrae’s Para Handy, and was promoted to skipper upon Macrae’s death. “Among a host of meticulously observed and rounded-out characters adapted from Lewis Grassic Gibbon and George Mackay Brown”, the Herald added, “his performance as Para Handy in The Vital Spark will always stand out”.
Pharic Maclaren, BBC Scotland’s senior drama producer, said: “There can only ever be one Roddy McMillan. His was a unique talent, both as an actor and as a writer. There was a truthfulness about everything he did, which he brought to every part he played and to every character he created”.
The plays All in Good Faith and The Bevellers were, Maclaren added, “landmarks in Scottish dramatic history”.
Read more: Herald Diary
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