Peter Medak’s work with Dory Previn was one of his career’s more unusual chapters | Film

Peter Medak’s long career was a book of many chapters (Peter Medak, veteran director of The Krays and The Changeling, dies aged 88, 28 October), but one of the more unusual ones was his collaboration with the singer-songwriter Dory Previn, with whom he developed several projects during his short-lived first Hollywood phase after The Ruling Class and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg had made him hot property.

Previn’s semi-autobiographical screenplay, The Third Girl from the Left, became Medak’s first US feature, a 1973 TV movie – though on this occasion his Hollywood career failed to ignite and he served out the rest of the 70s back in the UK. But he retained a great fondness for Dory, contributing half a century later to the glorious 2024 documentary Dory Previn: On My Way to Where.

Nick Lowe

London