Ted Kotcheff, Director Who Brought Rambo to the Screen, Dies at 94

New York Times

30-04-2025

Ted Kotcheff, a shape-shifting Canadian director whose films introduced audiences to characters including the troubled Vietnam War hero John Rambo, a dead body named Bernie and the young hustler Duddy Kravitz, died on April 10 in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he had lived for more than a decade. He was 94.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Thomas Kotcheff.
'My filmography is a gumbo,' Mr. Kotcheff wrote in his memoir, 'Director's Cut: My Life in Film' (2017, with Josh Young). 'Not being pigeonholed as the guy who makes one style of film has allowed me to traverse every genre.'
Mr. Kotcheff was directing television dramas in Britain when he met the novelist Mordecai Richler, a fellow Canadian, in the 1950s. They became friends and ended up sharing an apartment in London, where Mr. Richler wrote 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' (1959), a novel about an amoral Jewish wheeler-dealer in Montreal who will do whatever he can to rise from poverty to wealth. Mr. Kotcheff vowed to Mr. Richler that one day he would direct a movie version of it.
And he did. The film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, was made 15 years later.
Vincent Canby, reviewing 'Duddy Kravitz' for The New York Times, praised its 'abundance of visual and narrative detail,' which he speculated grew out of the 'close collaboration between Mr. Richler and Mr. Kotcheff.'
In 1982, Mr. Kotcheff directed 'First Blood,' the movie in which Sylvester Stallone first played Rambo, a troubled former Green Beret and Vietnam War veteran who travels to a small town in Washington State in search of an Army buddy but is mistaken for a vagrant, harassed and jailed. He then escapes to the woods with a posse in pursuit.
After filming the ending, in which Rambo killed himself, Mr. Stallone warned Mr. Kotcheff that the scene would anger audiences after the physical ordeal that Rambo had endured.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2017, Mr. Kotcheff recalled Mr. Stallone saying to him, 'All this and now we're gonna kill him?'
Attendees at a test screening uniformly reported that they loved the film but hated the ending. Mr. Kotcheff recalled that one audience member said aloud, 'If the director of this film is in this movie house, let's string him up from the nearest lamppost.'
By then, though, Mr. Kotcheff had filmed an alternative ending — the one he ultimately used — in which Rambo walks out of a police station, wounded but alive. The movie was an immediate hit, grossing more than $125 million (about $407 million in current dollars).
The movie's success spawned four sequels, none of which Mr. Kotcheff directed. He refused to direct the first, 'Rambo: First Blood Part II' (1985), because of the violence that the character unleashes.
'I read the script, and I said, 'In the first film he doesn't kill anybody,'' he told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. 'In this film he kills 74 people.''
Mr. Kotcheff's 'Weekend at Bernie's' (1989) had a modest box-office showing but became an unexpected cult hit. The movie follows two young employees of an insurance company (Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy) who frantically try to make Bernie (Terry Kiser), their murdered boss, appear alive through ruses like rolling him out to the sun deck of his beach house and rigging a device to make him appear to wave to passers-by.
He declined to direct its sequel because, he wrote in his memoir, 'I felt that I had run out of dead man jokes, or at least the desire to stage them.'
William Theodore Kotcheff was born on April 7, 1931, in Toronto. His father, Theodore, a Bulgarian immigrant, was a restaurateur. His mother, Diana (Christoff) Kotcheff, who was an ethnic Macedonian from Bulgaria, managed the home.
Both his parents performed as members of a left-wing theater club that staged plays in a Bulgarian-Macedonian hall. Watching his parents, aunts and uncles act onstage nurtured Ted's love of theater; at age 5, he played a village child in one of the troupe's plays, 'The Macedonian Blood Wedding.'
After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in English literature, he worked as a stagehand at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for two years before moving up to become a writer of documentaries and director of live dramas. Seeking greater opportunities, he left for Britain, where he directed television plays, movies and stage productions.
Mr. Kotcheff was barred from the United States for 21 years. In 1953, he said, he was turned away by U.S. immigration officers in Vermont for having been a member of a left-wing book club, which he had joined as a teenager and remained with for seven months. In 1968, during an anti-apartheid charity event that Mr. Kotcheff directed at Royal Albert Hall in London, a member of the rock band the Nice burned the image of an American flag on cardboard.
His 1971 film, 'Wake in Fright,' a thriller shot in Australia about a schoolteacher (played by Gary Bond) who descends into hell over the course of a few days in a town in the outback, was the country's official entry at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. In 2009, after helping to declare it a Cannes Classic, Martin Scorsese called it a 'deeply — and I mean deeply — unsettling and disturbing movie.'
He was finally let into the United States in 1974. The films he made after that included 'Fun With Dick and Jane' (1977), a comedy about a jobless middle-class couple (played by George Segal and Jane Fonda) who become armed robbers; 'North Dallas Forty' (1979), a gritty comedy-drama about a professional football team starring Nick Nolte and Mac Davis; and 'Uncommon Valor' (1983), the story of a retired Marine colonel (Gene Hackman) who organizes a rescue team to find American soldiers imprisoned nearly a decade after the Vietnam War.
In addition to his son Thomas — from his marriage to Laifun Chung, who also survives him — Mr. Kotcheff is survived by a daughter from that marriage, Alexandra Kotcheff; two sons, Aaron and Joshua, and a daughter, Katrina Kotcheff, from his marriage to the British actress Sylvia Kay, which ended in divorce; four grandchildren; and a brother, Tim.
After directing several TV movies in the 1990s, Mr. Kotcheff had a major final act as an executive producer of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,' from 1999 to 2012. He was in charge of casting the show, including its two leads, Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, and supervised the directors.
He also directed seven episodes of the series, one of them focused almost entirely on Ms. Hargitay, who, as Detective Olivia Benson, keeps a little girl, who says she is a hostage, on the phone until the police can find her. Neal Baer, a former showrunner on the series, said the episode had its roots in 'The Human Voice,' a one-character 1966 TV movie directed by Mr. Kotcheff starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman on the phone with the lover who is abandoning her. Ms. Hargitay won her only Primetime Emmy for the episode.
One project of Mr. Kotcheff's that never came to fruition, despite many years of work, was one about King Boris III of Bulgaria.
'He would say, 'I need money for King Boris!'' Mr. Baer recalled.