Peter Medak, the UK-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays, and The Ruling Class, has died in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Medak was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1937 and developed a fascination for filmmaking at the age of eight when his aunt gave him a 35mm hand-cranked projector and a strip of film.
After the family had been forced into hiding during the Second World War, Medak and his family endured further hardship under post-war Communist rule when his father was classified as a capitalist and imprisoned and his brother died. With his mother away for much of the day working in a plastics factory, the young Medak had time on his hands.
“I became an observer, you know, looking through this incredible keyhole of our apartment,” Medak once recalled. “I kept going seeing the same movies, three, four times a day. I started very early on, dissecting them […] strange kind of propaganda films […] you begin to see how it all kind of works.”
Medak consumed books, plays, films and music and at the age of 18 he fled to England in 1956 during the Hungarian Uprising against the communist regime. Barely able to speak a word of English, he got work through the industry connections of his opera-singer aunt Lotte Medák, training at British Pathe and then working on the sets of British productions at Elstree, Pinewood, and Shepperton studios.
He worked as an assistant director on The Great Armored Car Swindle (1961, aka The Breaking Point) and The Phantom Of The Opera (1962) before MCA Universal Pictures brought him to Los Angeles in 1963 and he signed a television-directing contract to work on the series Court Martial.
In 1967 Paramount signed him to direct his first feature, Negatives, starring Glenda Jackson. He went on to direct the stage adaptations A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg (1972) with Alan Bates, and The Ruling Class (1972) with Peter O’ Toole which premiered in Cannes and garnered a lead actor Oscar nomination for O’Toole.
Over six decades Medak directed 27 features, among them The Changeling (1980) with George C. Scott; The Krays (1990); Let Him Have It (1991); Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), with Gary Oldman. His 2018 documentary The Ghost Of Peter Sellers was Medak’s account of a low point – his ill-fated 1973 pirate comedy Ghost In The Noonday Sun at Columbia Pictures. Production was nearly derailed by his friend Sellers’ eccentric behaviour and a spiralling budget and the film never reached the silver screen.
Medak’s prolific television work saw him direct 59 episodes on such acclaimed series as The Wire, Breaking Bad, Homicide: Life On The Street, and Chicago Hope. He directed music videos for the likes of Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd, and shot a production of Salome In Minneapolis And ’Rigoletto with Los Angeles Opera.
Medak is quoted as saying: “If it’s in your blood, directing, you never stop directing and it doesn’t matter that you’re alone in your mind, dreaming or imagining things but you’re always making a movie.”
A devoted family man, he is survived by his four children Christopher, Joshua, Karen and Cornelia Medak; and his five grandchildren Sacha, Marlowe, Ryden, Oliver, and Anders.
He was married to Katherine La Kermance, Carolyn Seymour, and Julia Migenes, and was in a relationship with Christine Wagner.
