Peter Medak directing A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972). Photograph: RGR Collection/Alamy View image in fullscreen Peter Medak directing A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972). Photograph: RGR Collection/Alamy Film 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
Prefer the Guardian on Google Peter Medak, the British-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays and Let Him Have It, has died aged 88. Medak’s family announced he died peacefully 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.
View image in fullscreen Gary Kemp, left with Martin Kemp, right, and Billie Whitelaw in Medak’s biopic of the Kray twins Photograph: Warner Bros./Sportsphoto/Allstar Born in Hungary in 1937, Medak was forced into hiding along with his Jewish family during the second world war, and then escaped the country during the Hungarian uprising. He came to London, where his aunt Lotte Medák was an internationally renowned opera singer and through her contacts Medak was taken on as a trainee at newsreel producers Associated British-Pathé, working 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…