Early and Private Life
Millar was born in Standon in Hertfordshire. He was the elder son of Gerald Millar, MC and his wife Ruth. His paternal grandmother, Beatrix ("Trixie"), was the daughter of author George du Maurier and the sister of Gerald du Maurier (himself the father of Daphne du Maurier) and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (whose children with Arthur Llewelyn Davies were adopted by J.M. Barrie); she had married Charlie Millar in the 1880s.
Millar was educated at Rugby School and the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, graduating with an Academic Diploma in the History of Art. Among his teachers at the Courtauld was its director, Anthony Blunt. When Blunt succeeded Kenneth Clark as Surveyor of the King's Pictures in 1945, Millar asked him for a job. He became an Assistant Surveyor in 1947.
He married Delia Dawnay in 1954. She was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Dawnay, MC. They had three daughters and a son. His wife died in 2004. He died instantly of a heart attack whilst walking across St James's Square in London having come from an appointment at Christie's to look at a picture by Lely.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Millar
Famous quotes containing the words private life, early, private and/or life:
“In private life he was good-natured, chearful, social; inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals. He had a coarse, strong wit, which he was too free of for a man in his station, as it is always inconsistent with dignity. He was very able as a minister, but without a certain elevation of mind necessary for great good, or great mischief.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
““Life is a dangerous adventure,” says the American; and he is half right: life is dangerous, but it’s not an adventure.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)