Peter Medak's career is usually bookended by prestige: The Ruling Class, The Krays, The Changeling. What gets lost in that shorthand is the texture of the in-between — the Hollywood flirtation that never quite caught, the collaborators who mattered personally even when the work didn't land commercially. Dory Previn was one of those collaborators. After The Ruling Class and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg made Medak briefly hot property in Hollywood, it was Previn's semi-autobiographical screenplay that became his first American feature: The Third Girl from the Left, a 1973 TV movie. The project was unusual by any measure — a singer-songwriter's confessional script handed to a British director still finding his footing in a new industry. The Hollywood career didn't ignite. Medak spent the rest of the 1970s back in the UK, and The Third Girl from the Left slipped into the category of things-that-almost-were. But the relationship with Previn endured in a way that professional disappointments usually don't. Fifty years later, Medak contributed to the 2024 PBS documentary Dory Previn: On My Way to Where — described here as 'glorious.' That half-century arc, from a TV movie that failed to launch a career to a documentary tribute, is the kind of loyalty the film industry rarely rewards and rarer still acknowledges. The letter, written by Nick Lowe of London to the Guardian following Medak's obituary, is a small act of recovery. Medak died aged 88 on 28 October. Without Lowe's note, the Previn chapter — the American detour, the personal fondness, the late documentary cameo — might not have made it into the public record at all.
