Zadek directed his first opera, Mozart’s "The Marriage of Figaro", in 1983. He also directed Kurt Weill's opera, "Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny" ("Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny") at the Salzburg Festival in 1998. Zadek acted in a small role in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film "Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss" ("Veronika Voss", 1982). Beside of the fact, being chosen as "Director of the year" numerous times by the German "Theater heute" magazine, he got following awards:  Following Zadek's death, British critic Michael Billington wrote in "The Guardian":"Zadek was mercurial, intuitive, even populist in his approach – and the results were sometimes astonishing. Four of his shows came to the Edinburgh International festival and he always made you re-assess a play. I recall a modern-dress "Merchant of Venice" in which Gert Voss's assimilated Shylock, even after his humiliation in the trial scene, coolly strolled off stage as if preparing to phone his broker. In 2004, Zadek also brought us a brilliantly witty, ironic "Peer Gynt": one that suggested Ibsen anticipated Strindbergian dream-drama, Brechtian expressionism, the madhouse world of the Marat/Sade and even modern physical theatre." Billington also wrote in the same article:"Although Zadek made his name in Germany, he never forgot his British roots. When I went to see his Berlin production of Pinter's "Moonlight", he told me that he loved Pinter's work because of its origins in weekly rep and because, as he said, "it was like a combination of Agatha Christie and Kafka". But Zadek also understood Pinter's play profoundly: rarely have I seen Pinter's idea that women possess an emotional awareness denied to men so vividly expressed." In 1999 in Vienna, when he directed "Hamlet" with a woman in the title role, the Austrian newspaper "Wiener Zeitung" criticized him having to much of a "children belief in justice" (Kinderglaube an Gerechtigkeit). In 2015, the city of Bochum designated a newly built street close to the Schauspielhaus Bochum as "Peter-Zadek-Straße".