Peter Medak, Director of The Changeling and The Krays, Dies at 88

Peter Medak, the British-Hungarian director of the 1980 ghost story The Changeling and the 1990 gangster film The Krays, has died aged 88.

The Changeling remains his most cited work. When Martin Scorsese compiled a brief list of his favourite horror films in 2013, he placed The Changeling alongside The Shining, The Exorcist and Psycho, calling it a “haunted house movie filled with sadness and dread”. Guillermo del Toro went further, calling it “a masterpiece”.

The film follows a composer, played by George C. Scott, grieving his wife and daughter after a road accident. He moves into a long-vacant Seattle mansion and becomes convinced a spectral presence is trying to communicate with him. The frights are low-key — a bath that runs itself, a cobwebbed wheelchair, visions of a child's face warped underwater — but the film's patience and its prioritising of atmosphere over revelation keep it chilling.

What kind of director was Medak?

Horror was a rare detour. He was already admired for The Ruling Class (1972), a madcap satire starring an Oscar-nominated Peter O'Toole as an aristocrat who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. The critic Janet Maslin identified in Medak a “droll affinity for eccentric behaviour”.

He later built two stylised visions of British postwar criminality. The Krays (1990) cast Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet as the twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, with Billie Whitelaw as their formidable mother, Kate Hardie as Reggie's tortured wife, and Tom Bell and Steven Berkoff as hoods who meet a grisly end. Philip Ridley's hauntingly dream-like script was, per the obituary's account, directed with flair and lucidity.

In an unusual move, the Krays themselves — including brother Charlie, credited as a “technical assistant” — were paid handsomely. Ronnie still hated the result. “You had my mum swearing in it and she never swore,” he complained.

Let Him Have It (1991) followed, dramatising the case of Derek Bentley (Christopher Eccleston), hanged in 1953 for a police officer's fatal shooting even though he did not pull the trigger. The conviction was quashed in 1998.

A childhood in wartime Budapest

Medak's own story rivals his films. Born in Budapest to Elisabeth (nee Diamounstein), a seamstress, and Gyula Medák, a textile company boss later imprisoned as a capitalist under the late-1940s communist takeover, he was six in June 1944 when the family maid, serving Saturday soup, described soldiers of the Arrow Cross party — “a hundred times worse than the SS”, Medak said — rounding up Jewish citizens at gunpoint. “My father said: 'We've got to leave right now.'”

The family evaded document checks, passed dead bodies and trucks of prisoners, and lived eight months under false identities in a basement next to an SS-commandeered building, attending church each Sunday to keep up the pretence. Returning to their partially destroyed apartment the following year, they found lunch still on the table, garnished with brick dust. “The whole world was turned upside down, the war had ended, and there were these soup bowls,” Medak recalled.

A hand-cranked 35mm camera, a gift from his London-based aunt, the soprano Lotte Medák, sparked his interest in film-making. At 18, fleeing Hungary during the 1956 revolution, he turned to her again; her contacts landed him a trainee job at Associated British-Pathé. He rose to assistant or second-unit director on films including Hammer's The Phantom of the Opera (1962) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer.

What does his filmography add up to?

His directing debut, Negatives (1968), starred Glenda Jackson and Peter McEnery as lovers consumed by role-playing. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972) featured Alan Bates and Janet Suzman; The Third Girl from the Left (1973) paired Tony Curtis with Kim Novak.

Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974) he called “the biggest disaster of my life” — a pirate comedy shot in the Mediterranean with a lovesick, seasick, mercurial Peter Sellers, who tried to organise a mutiny against him. “My career was nearly completely destroyed,” Medak said. The film was shelved, but he revisited the catastrophe in the documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018), suffused with affection for the troubled star.

Later work included The Odd Job (1978) with Graham Chapman, Zorro – The Gay Blade (1981) with George Hamilton in dual roles, The Men's Club (1986) with Harvey Keitel, Frank Langella and Roy Scheider, and Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) with Gary Oldman as a corrupt cop.

Television proved his most reliable employment: four 1982 episodes of Hart to Hart, plus Remington Steele, Magnum PI, St Elsewhere and The Twilight Zone; six episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets between 1994 and 1998; and single episodes of The Wire (2002), House MD (2007) and Breaking Bad (2009).

His first wife, Katherine La Kermance, whom he married in 1963, died in 1972. He is survived by their children, Karen and Christopher; two children, Joshua and Cornelia, from his second marriage to Carolyn Seymour, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and his partner, Christine Wagner. With Scorsese's endorsement on record and The Ghost of Peter Sellers still circulating, his two most personal films look set to keep his reputation alive.