Peter Medak, veteran director of The Krays and The Changeling, dies aged 88

The film-maker enjoyed a long and varied film and TV career, from horror movies and true-crime thrillers to Cannibal and Breaking Bad

Peter Medak, the British-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays and Let Him Have It, has died aged 88. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Medak’s family announced he died in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

Medak enjoyed a long and varied career across film and TV, which included spirit-of-the-times classics A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The Ruling Class (both from 1972), cult horror The Changeling with George C Scott, and The Krays and Let Him Have It, period true crime films made in the early 1990s. He also directed numerous episodes of high-profile TV drama, including the 80s revival of The Twilight Zone, Homicide: Life on the Street, and Hannibal.

Born in Hungary in 1937, Medak escaped the country during the Hungarian uprising and came to London, where his aunt Lotte Medák was an internationally renowned opera singer. Through her contacts Medak was taken on as a trainee at newsreel producers Associated British-Pathé, and worked his way up through the studio departments, including a spell working in the editing room with future Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. Medak then worked as assistant director to Joan Littlewood on Sparrows Can’t Sing and Guy Hamilton on Funeral in Berlin before making his own feature directing debut in 1968 with erotic thriller Negatives, starring Peter McEnery and Glenda Jackson.

Medak then followed this up with two adaptations of celebrated plays: Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, with Alan Bates, and Peter Barnes’ The Ruling Class, starring Peter O’Toole. Both were well received on their release in 1972, with O’Toole nominated for the best actor Oscar, but Medak would swiftly hit trouble two years later with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a still-notorious Peter Sellers vehicle that went vastly over budget, partly due to Sellers’ erratic behaviour, and which was only released on home video more than a decade later. (Calling it the “biggest disaster of my life”, Medak would later make a documentary about the experience, which screened at the Venice film festival in 2018.)

Following the Graham Chapman comedy The Odd Job, Medak re-established his credibility with The Changeling, the creepy 1980 George C Scott horror about a composer who rents a haunted house. Calling it “filled with sadness and dread”, it was named by Martin Scorsese as one of his favourite horror movies. After spells on Shelley Duvall’s anthology series Faerie Tale Theatre and The Twilight Zone, Medak returned to features with two high-profile British crime thrillers. The Krays, released in 1990, cast Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp as the twin-brother gangsters, followed by Let Him Have It, about a controversial case which saw 19-year-old Derek Bentley hanged in 1953 for the murder of a policeman despite not pulling the trigger. Medak then returned to Hollywood with the Gary Oldman thriller Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993.

Medak pivoted back to TV and, starting in 1994, directed six episodes of acclaimed cop series Homicide: Life on the Street, and followed it up by directing an episode of The Wire in 2002. Later TV work included episodes of high-profile shows such as House, Breaking Bad and Cannibal.

Skyfall and No Time to Die writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who worked with Medak on their first produced script Let Him Have It, told the Guardian: “Peter directed our first film and we couldn’t have hoped for a kinder, more respectful collaborator. It was wonderful to be treated as equals by this very experienced film-maker, who was enjoying a resurgence in his film career after the exciting and surprising The Krays. He was a good friend and we 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 between 1963 and 1972, Carolyn Seymour between 1973 and 1984, and Julia Migenes between 1988 and 2003.