Peter Medak's career reads like a field guide to surviving the film industry. Born in Budapest in 1937, he spent part of his childhood in hiding with his Jewish family during the Second World War, escaped Hungary during the 1956 uprising, and arrived in London with connections — his aunt Lotte Medák was an internationally renowned opera singer — but no obvious path into film. He found one anyway, training at Associated British-Pathé, cutting his teeth in editing rooms alongside a future Hugh Hudson, and working as assistant director to Joan Littlewood and Guy Hamilton before making his own debut in 1968 with the erotic thriller Negatives. The early 1970s established what Medak could do when given serious material. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, adapted from Peter Nichols' play with Alan Bates, and The Ruling Class, from Peter Barnes' work with Peter O'Toole, both arrived in 1972 to strong reception. O'Toole received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. These were films that trusted their theatrical sources rather than "opening them up" in the manner studios usually demanded, and they hold up as examples of exactly that discipline. Then came Ghost in the Noonday Sun. The Peter Sellers pirate comedy went catastrophically over budget, partly due to Sellers' behaviour, and was left unreleased for over a decade. Medak later called it the biggest disaster of his life. Most directors do not recover from a production this notorious. Medak did, and the recovery was not a quiet return to safety — it was The Changeling. The 1980 haunted-house film with George C. Scott, which Medak described as filled with sadness and dread, became a cult horror landmark. Martin Scorsese named it one of his favourite horror films. It is genuinely unsettling in ways that have less to do with shock and more to do with atmosphere and sustained grief — an unusual register for genre horror then or now. The film's reputation has grown steadily since release. The early 1990s brought what are arguably Medak's most culturally visible films. The Krays in 1990 — casting Spandau Ballet's Gary and Martin Kemp as the gangster twins — was a surprise critical and commercial success that helped launch a wave of British crime pictures. Let Him Have It followed in 1991, covering the Derek Bentley case: a 19-year-old hanged in 1953 for a policeman's murder despite not having pulled the trigger. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, later the Skyfall and No Time to Die writers, contributed the script for Let Him Have It — their first produced work. They remembered Medak as a director who treated first-time writers as equals. Television gave Medak consistent work across several decades without diminishing his ambition. He directed six episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street from 1994, an episode of The Wire in 2002, and later contributed to House, Breaking Bad, and Hannibal. These were not the credits of a director coasting — they were the credits of someone who understood that prestige television, especially in its early 2000s form, was where interesting American drama lived. Medak died in Los Angeles on Tuesday, aged 88. He had been married three times — to Katherine La Kermance from 1963 to 1972, to Carolyn Seymour from 1973 to 1984, and to Julia Migenes from 1988 to 2003. He made a documentary about the Ghost in the Noonday Sun experience that screened at the Venice film festival in 2018, which suggests he never stopped working with what he had, including the disasters.
