Peter Medak, veteran director of The Krays and The Changeling, dies aged 88 — SkimNews
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- Peter Medak died peacefully in Los Angeles on Tuesday aged 88, the news confirmed by his family; born in Hungary in 1937, he hid with his Jewish family during the second world war before escaping after the Hungarian uprising.
- Medak made his feature directing debut in 1968 with the erotic thriller Negatives, starring Peter McEnery and Glenda Jackson, after training at newsreel producers Associated British-Pathé and assisting Joan Littlewood and Guy Hamilton.
- Medak followed in 1972 with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, starring Alan Bates, and The Ruling Class, for which Peter O'Toole was nominated for the best actor Oscar; both were well received.
- Ghost in the Noonday Sun, Medak's 1974 Peter Sellers vehicle, went vastly over budget partly because of Sellers' erratic behaviour and reached home video only more than a decade later; Medak called it the "biggest disaster of my life" and a documentary about the experience screened at the Venice film festival in 2018.
- The Changeling re-established Medak's credibility in 1980, with George C Scott as a composer renting a haunted house, and was named by Martin Scorsese as one of his favourite horror movies.
- The Krays cast Spandau Ballet's Gary and Martin Kemp as twin-brother gangsters in 1990; the follow-up, Let Him Have It, revisited the case of Derek Bentley, hanged at 19 in 1953 for the murder of a policeman despite not pulling the trigger, and Medak returned to Hollywood with the Gary Oldman thriller Romeo Is Bleeding in 1993.
- Homicide: Life on the Street anchored Medak's television comeback, with six episodes directed from 1994, followed by one episode of The Wire in 2002 and later turns on House, Breaking Bad, Cannibal and Hannibal.
- Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, the Skyfall and No Time to Die writers whose first produced script was Let Him Have It, said Medak "directed our first film" and was "a kinder, more respectful collaborator" who treated them as equals during his resurgence after The Krays.
Why it matters: Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, the writers behind Skyfall and No Time to Die, made their first produced script under Medak's direction, so the duo now shaping Bond films trace their careers directly to the late director's 1990s comeback with The Krays.
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