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

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, his family announced that he died in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

Medak's career ran across five decades of film and television. His features included the spirit-of-the-times classics A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The Ruling Class (both 1972), the cult horror The Changeling with George C Scott, and two early-1990s period true-crime films, The Krays and Let Him Have It. On television, he directed episodes of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, Homicide: Life on the Street and Hannibal.

How did a Hungarian refugee become a British director?

Born in Hungary in 1937, Medak fled the country during the Hungarian uprising and arrived in London, where his aunt Lotte Medák was an internationally renowned opera singer. Through her contacts, Associated British-Pathé, the newsreel producers, took him on as a trainee. He worked his way up through the studio departments, including a spell in the editing room alongside Hugh Hudson, the future director of Chariots of Fire.

He served as assistant director to Joan Littlewood on Sparrows Can't Sing and to Guy Hamilton on Funeral in Berlin. His feature debut came in 1968 with the erotic thriller Negatives, starring Peter McEnery and Glenda Jackson.

What were the highs and the disaster?

Medak followed Negatives with two celebrated stage adaptations: 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 release in 1972, and O'Toole earned a best actor Oscar nomination.

Trouble came two years later. Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a Peter Sellers vehicle that went vastly over budget — partly due to Sellers' erratic behaviour — was released on home video only more than a decade later. Medak called it the "biggest disaster of my life" and later made a documentary about the experience, which screened at the Venice film festival in 2018.

After the Graham Chapman comedy The Odd Job, he rebuilt his standing with The Changeling, the 1980 George C Scott horror about a composer who rents a haunted house. Medak described the film as "filled with sadness and dread"; Martin Scorsese named it one of his favourite horror movies.

Following work on Shelley Duvall's anthology series Faerie Tale Theatre and The Twilight Zone, Medak returned to features with The Krays (1990), casting Spandau Ballet's Gary and Martin Kemp as the twin-brother gangsters. Let Him Have It followed, examining the controversial case of 19-year-old Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 for a policeman's murder despite not pulling the trigger. Medak went back to Hollywood with the Gary Oldman thriller Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993.

From 1994 he directed six episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, then an episode of The Wire in 2002. Later television credits included House, Breaking Bad and Hannibal.

What do his collaborators say?

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. They 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."

They added: "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 from 1963 to 1972, Carolyn Seymour from 1973 to 1984, and Julia Migenes from 1988 to 2003. The future projects his collaborators mention now remain unwritten — the clearest measure of what his death removes from British cinema.