Millais made a meal for Orson Welles after the actor-director had hired his house in Andalusia, Spain for a year while filming, then left him stranded, penniless, in Naples.
There was also an occasion where Millais shared Huevos Cubanos with Ernest Hemingway (whose chauffeur he apparently became for a while), Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich after sailing into a mini-revolution in pre-Castro Cuba and getting shot through the arm at the helm of his racing yacht, the Benbow.
He portrayed Roy Endean in The Dogs of War (1980) and Uncle Martin, an 18th-century grandee in The Wicked Lady (1983), in which John Gielgud played his butler and Faye Dunaway his niece.
He played the US Colonel in Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990), as well as appearing in British TV shows such as Deceptions, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Kavanagh QC and Foreign Affairs.
As Herbert Kretzmer put it, Hugh showed "wisdom and acquired magnificence by not doing any one thing for too long", while Robert Altman said: “As an actor, he is an excellent cook.