Director Peter Medak, Maker of The Changeling, Dies at 88
The British-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays and Let Him Have It died peacefully in Los Angeles on Tuesday, his family announced.
Peter Medak, the British-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays and Let Him Have It, has died aged 88. His family announced that he died peacefully in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Medak was born in Hungary in 1937. His Jewish family was forced into hiding during the second world war, and he later escaped the country during the Hungarian uprising. In London, his aunt Lotte Medák was an internationally renowned opera singer, and her contacts got him a traineeship at the newsreel producer Associated British-Pathé. He worked up through the studio departments, including a spell in the editing room with Hugh Hudson, later the director of Chariots of Fire. He then became assistant director to Joan Littlewood on Sparrows Can't Sing and to Guy Hamilton on Funeral in Berlin.
From Negatives to The Ruling Class
His first feature as a director was the 1968 erotic thriller Negatives, starring Peter McEnery and Glenda Jackson. Two stage adaptations followed in 1972: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, with Alan Bates, and The Ruling Class, with Peter O'Toole, who was nominated for the best actor Oscar.
Trouble came two years later with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a Peter Sellers vehicle that went vastly over budget, partly because of Sellers' erratic behaviour. It reached home video only more than a decade later. Medak called it the "biggest disaster of my life" and made a documentary about the experience, shown at the Venice film festival in 2018.
Horror, crime and television
He rebuilt his standing with The Changeling, a 1980 horror film starring George C Scott as a composer who rents a haunted house. Martin Scorsese named it among his favourite horror movies. In 1990 came The Krays, with Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet as the twin gangsters. Let Him Have It followed, about the case of Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 at the age of 19 for the murder of a policeman although he did not pull the trigger. In 1993 he directed Romeo Is Bleeding, a thriller with Gary Oldman.
Starting in 1994 he directed six episodes of the cop series Homicide: Life on the Street, then an episode of The Wire in 2002. Later TV work included episodes of House, Breaking Bad and Hannibal. Earlier he had worked on the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone and on Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre.
Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, the writers of Skyfall and No Time to Die, worked with Medak on their first produced script, Let Him Have It. "Peter directed our first film and we couldn't have hoped for a kinder, more respectful collaborator," they told the Guardian. They said they will miss the lunches and the talk of all the future projects he still burned to make.
Medak was married three times: to Katherine La Kermance from 1963 to 1972, to Carolyn Seymour from 1973 to 1984, and to Julia Migenes from 1988 to 2003.
Source: The Guardian