Peter Medak, Director of ‘The Ruling Class’ and ‘The Changeling,’ Dies at 88

Peter Medak, the Hungarian-born director who guided Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class, George C. Scott in the classic ghost story The Changeling and Gary Oldman in the crime thriller Romeo Is Bleeding, died Tuesday in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 88. Medak made his feature directorial debut on the erotic Negatives (1968), featuring Glenda Jackson in one of her first films, and followed that with the black comedy A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), starring Alan Bates and Janet Suzman in an adaptation of Peter Nichols’ play. He also helmed the British gangster drama The Krays (1990), with Gary Kemp and brother Martin Kemp, both members of Spandau Ballet, as real-life British gangsters; Let Him Have It (1991), featuring Christopher Eccleston and Tom Courtenay in another true story, about a controversial hanging; and Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), starring George Hamilton. For television, Medak worked on multiple episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, Hart to Hart and Shelley Duvall‘s Faerie Tale Theatre and on installments of Breaking Bad, The Wire, Space: 1999, Magnum, P.I., Law & Order: SVU, St. Elsewhere, Chicago Hope, House and Cold Case. With Medak calling the shots, O’Toole picked up the fifth of his eight career best actor Oscar nominations for his turn as a British nobleman who believes he’s Jesus Christ and then Jack the Ripper in the dark comedy The Ruling Class (1972). Based on a play by Peter Barnes, who also wrote the screenplay, the film played in competition at Cannes. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Amenábar are among those who admire his Changeling (1980), about a grieving composer (Scott) caught in a supernatural mystery involving his new home. Spielberg, in fact, screened the film several times for his crew on Poltergeist to help set the tone for that horror classic, Medak noted in a 2018 interview. “He said, ‘This is what it should be.’ It was a great compliment coming from him, and I know he even has his own 35mm copy of The Changeling, and so does Martin Scorsese,” he said. “It’s lovely to have that, to be on their lists of the greatest ghost stories of all time.” Oldman scored high marks for his performance as a corrupt New York homicide detective involved with a vicious hitwoman (Lena Olin) in Romeo Is Bleeding (1993). In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote that Medak “keeps the action stylish, sexy and fiendishly funny. The film rarely makes a lick of sense, but it’s compulsively watchable.” Alas, Medak also is famous for directing the lamentable Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), a comedy about bumbling 17th century pirates that starred the combustible Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. “Oh, it was probably the biggest nightmare of my life,” he said in a 2007 interview for the DGA. Even though the film nearly torpedoed his career, he chose to revisit the experience by helming the 2018 documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers. Peter Medak (center) with actors Janet Suzman and Alan Bates on the set of 1972’s ‘A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.’ Courtesy Everett Collection Medak was born on Dec. 23, 1937, in Budapest, Hungary. In 1956, he fled to England during his country’s uprising against the communists, and his aunt, an opera singer, helped him quickly land a job with the Associated British Picture Corp. He started out as an editor, cameraman and assistant director and helped out Fred Zinnemann on The Sundowners (1960). A stint as a second A.D. on The V.I.P.s (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, led to him in 1963 to sign a seven-year contract at Universal Studios to direct for television in Hollywood and London. After many months of false starts, he made his helming debut with a 1965 episode of ITV/Universal’s Court Martial, starring Bradford Dillman and Peter Graves. He had quite the start to his film career. “My first three movies‚ Negatives, Joe Egg and Ruling Class, were just total perfection for me to make as a young director,” he said in a 2020 interview. In 1973, Medak was asked to direct Death Wish, but when he insisted that Henry Fonda be cast as the lead, Paramount turned to Michael Winner, who hired Charles Bronson for the role of vigilante Paul Kersey. On King’s Road in London that year, he ran into Sellers, who invited him to direct Ghost in the Noonday Sun. “Peter was a nightmare,” he recalled. “It was his project, which he developed for two years before me, and I realized about a month before shooting that he’s never read the script. If you can believe it.” The film was shot on location in Cypress, and its pirate ship broke down daily and had to be towed back to the harbor. Meanwhile, the mercurial Sellers fired the producers and faked a heart attack to get time off. (Days later, Medak was stunned to see a newspaper photo of his star dining with Princess Margaret.) The film was so bad, Columbia Pictures never released it; it finally made its way to VHS in the early ’80s. Medak didn’t direct another feature until The Odd Job (1978), starring Monty Python member Graham Chapman. “I was basically punishing myself unconsciously for not making the greatest success of a film with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan,” he said. “But it wasn’t my fault. Peter’s terrible, insane, destructive behavior on that film [was the reason it failed].” Medak’s résumé also included the features The Men’s Club (1986), La voix humaine (1990), Pontiac Moon (1994) and Species II (1998) and the 1997 telefilm The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Mandy Patinkin as Quasimodo. And his love of music of all genres provided him with opportunities to direct early music videos for artists such as Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd. Survivors include his children, Christopher, Joshua, Karen and Cornelia, and his grandchildren, Sacha, Marlowe, Ryden, Oliver and Anders. He was married to Catherine Marie La Kermance from 1963 until her death by suicide in 1972; to English actress Carolyn Seymour (she’s the wife of O’Toole’s character in The Ruling Class) from 1973 until their 1984 divorce; and to opera singer Julia Migenes from 1988 until their 2003 divorce. “If it’s in your blood, directing, you never stop,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter that you’re alone in your mind, dreaming or imagining things, you’re always making a movie.”