Latest news with #Kotcheff
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ted Kotcheff, Director Who Brought Rambo to the Screen, Dies at 94
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.
American Military News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- American Military News
Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood' and ‘Weekend at Bernie's' director, dies at 94
Prolific Canadian-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, who directed the films 'First Blood,' 'Weekend at Bernie's,' 'Wake in Fright,' 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' 'Fun With Dick and Jane' and 'North Dallas Forty,' in addition to a long run as an executive producer on 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,' has died. He was 94. Kotcheff's daughter Kate Kotcheff said via email that he died peacefully while under sedation Thursday night in a hospital in Nuevo Nayarit, Mexico. In a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kotcheff said, 'The sense of being outside of the mainstream of the community has always attracted me. All my pictures deal with people outside or people who don't know what's driving them.' Born in Toronto on April 7, 1931, to Bulgarian immigrants, Kotcheff began working in television in the early 1950s. He later moved to the U.K., directing for both stage and television. In 1971, he directed 'Wake in Fright' in Australia, which a Times review upon its 2012 re-release called, 'raw, unsettling and mesmerizing.' Returning to Canada in the early 1970s, Kotcheff directed 1974's adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' starring Richard Dreyfuss that would win the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and earn writer Lionel Chetwynd an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay. Kotcheff found huge success in Hollywood with 1982's 'First Blood,' which first introduced the traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo played by Sylvester Stallone. Reviewing 'First Blood,' Times critic Sheila Benson wrote, 'this violent and disturbing film is exceptionally well made.' Benson added, 'If it is possible to dislike and admire a film in almost equal measure, then 'First Blood' would win on that split ticket. … Kotcheff has seared so many lingering examples of exultant nihilism into our brains that words to the contrary are so much sop. It's action, not words, that makes 'First Blood' run, and the action is frightening, indeed.' If 'First Blood' tapped into the despair and anxiety of post-Vietnam America, 1989's 'Weekend at Bernie's' became an unlikely cultural touchstone for its carefree, freewheeling playfulness, displaying Kotcheff's versatility. The film follows two ambitious young men (played by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who create a series of elaborate ruses over the course of a hectic weekend that their sketchy boss (Terry Kiser) actually isn't dead. In a review of 'Bernie's,' Times critic Kevin Thomas wrote that, 'a weekend among the rich, the jaded and the corrupt is just the right cup of tea for an acid social satirist such as Kotcheff,' also noting the filmmaker's small cameo in the film as father to one of the young men. Eventually Kotcheff returned to television, working for more than 10 years and on nearly 300 episodes of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.' In 2011, Kotcheff received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Canada. He published a memoir, 'Director's Cut: My Life in Film,' in 2017. Kotcheff is survived by his wife, Laifun Chung, and children Kate and Thomas Kotcheff. He is predeceased by his first wife, actress Sylvia Kay, with whom he had three children. ___ © 2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff obituary
The Canadian film-maker Ted Kotcheff, who has died aged 94, was denied entry to the US for being a suspected communist, banned for life from the Royal Albert Hall for organising a 1968 anti-apartheid charity show that ended with the burning of the American flag, and directed a TV play, broadcast live, in which one of the actors died during the second act. If this suggests a calamitous career, the reality was very different. Kotcheff's beginnings as a hired hand in Canadian television left him well-placed to become one of the most versatile directors in commercial cinema. How could the same man who made the terrifying thriller Wake in Fright (1971), which Martin Scorsese called 'disturbing' and 'beautifully calibrated', be responsible also for the lively coming-of-age comedy The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) starring a young, zingy Richard Dreyfuss? How could one film-maker leap from the gritty First Blood (1982), with Sylvester Stallone as the Vietnam veteran and proto-survivalist John Rambo, to the macabre slapstick of Weekend at Bernie's (1989), in which two insurance company employees try to pass off their dead boss as living? Kotcheff did. And he did it exceedingly well, without ever repeating himself. He turned down the sequel to First Blood, reasoning that Rambo was 'a man who abhorred violence [and] wrestled with the moral dilemma of violence in Vietnam' whereas the follow-up turned him into 'a gratuitous killing machine'. He also declined to direct the Weekend at Bernie's sequel, saying he had 'run out of dead man jokes, or at least the desire to stage them'. It was more his style to make, say, a TV version of Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice with Ingrid Bergman, which he did in 1967, or Billy Two Hats (1974), starring Gregory Peck, which had the distinction of being the first western shot in Israel. He was born William Kotcheff in Toronto, to immigrant parents – Theodore, a Macedonian restaurateur, and Diana (nee Christoff), who was Bulgarian – and raised in the slum neighbourhood known as Cabbagetown. He accompanied his parents to rehearsals for their leftwing theatre group, which put on plays in a Bulgarian-Macedonian hall, and appeared on stage at the age of five as a village child in The Macedonian Blood Wedding. He was educated at Silverthorn public school and Runnymede collegiate institute and graduated in 1952 from the University of Toronto with a degree in English. It was during his early days at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that he changed his first name: the company already had 12 Bills working there, so he promoted one of his middle names (Theodore), though he reverted to William for the credits on his first film, the comedy-drama Tiara Tahiti (1962), starring James Mason. In 1953, he travelled with a fellow CBC stagehand to New York for a holiday, only to have his entry to the US barred because of his brief membership, six years earlier, of the Left Wing Book Club in Toronto. The ban shaped the next few decades of his career. 'It marooned me professionally in Canada, which had no film industry whatsoever at that time,' he said. Nevertheless, he quickly made his mark in television, directing a major anthology series at 24 and proceeding to live TV drama. Eager to expand his talents, he was stymied by the lack of a national cinema and the monopoly that British directors had on directing Canadian theatre. While compatriots such as Arthur Hiller and Norman Jewison had relocated to Hollywood, Kotcheff headed for the UK, where he found TV and theatre work. It was during the transmission of his live TV play Underground (1958), about survivors of a bomb attack on London, that the actor Gareth Jones, who played the villain, suffered a fatal heart attack. As Jones was stretchered away, Kotcheff hastily rejigged the third act to conceal the sudden absence of the drama's chief antagonist. 'One TV critic thought it was a brilliant narrative device of mine to eliminate the character,' he said. His second film, Life at the Top (1965), followed the main character from the kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, again played by Laurence Harvey and now married with two children but with a wandering eye and vague political ambitions. It brought Kotcheff to the attention of Michelangelo Antonioni, who sought his advice on cutting 20 minutes from his existential thriller Blow-Up (1966). 'He ended up using practically all of my suggestions,' Kotcheff said. His stock continued to rise with the award-winning TV film Edna, the Inebriate Woman, broadcast in 1971 as a BBC Play for Today to an audience of more than nine million. Written by Jeremy Sandford, also responsible for Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966), it starred Patricia Hayes as the title character, who is unhoused and alcoholic. The choice of a predominantly comic actor to play dramatic material was inspired, though Kotcheff had to plead with ITV to release Hayes from her filming commitments on The Benny Hill Show. In the same year, Wake in Fright had its premiere at Cannes, where the young Scorsese expressed his admiration for the film vocally throughout the screening. Evan Jones, with whom Kotcheff had collaborated on the race drama Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), adapted Wake in Fright from Kenneth Cook's novel about a schoolteacher who loses all his money gambling in the outback and ends up stranded there. Kotcheff, who shot the film in punishing conditions ('110 degrees in the shade – and there was no shade'), described it as 'one man's descent into hell'. He evoked that infernal mood masterfully, not least in harrowing climactic footage of a real-life kangaroo hunt. But the devil was in the tiniest details, too. Kotcheff specified to the design and costume departments that there should be no cool colours on screen ('I want the intense heat of the outback to be omnipresent,' he told them). He also sprayed the interiors with dust that was tinted the colour of the outback desert, and released small quantities of flies on to the set during every take. His next film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was adapted by his friend Mordecai Richler from Richler's own 1959 novel about an ambitious and restless young man bouncing from one money-making venture to the next in Montreal's Jewish area. In one, Duddy (Dreyfuss) hires an over-the-hill documentary maker (Denholm Elliott) to shoot a barmitzvah. In a genius move, Kotcheff includes the hilariously highfalutin result as a film-within-the-film. He described The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival, as 'his entrée into Hollywood', and found that previous objections to him entering the US had evaporated. He made his Hollywood debut with the comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), starring Jane Fonda and George Segal as a middle-class couple who turn to crime when their fortunes take a downturn. Segal was also the star of Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), AKA Too Many Chefs, an eccentric and underrated black comedy to which Kotcheff brought his customary flair and eye for detail. Shooting in Michelin-starred restaurants, it was the only one of his films during which he gained rather than lost weight. North Dallas Forty (1979) was an unsentimental study of life inside the NFL, with Nick Nolte superb as a veteran wide receiver bruised and buffeted by the sport. The NFL refused to cooperate with the production, and it was rumoured that former players who did were later shunned by the organisation. First Blood and another Vietnam-oriented project, Uncommon Valour (1983), with Gene Hackman as a former Marine colonel who returns to Laos to find his missing son, were sandwiched between two films starring James Woods: In Split Image (1982), he was a brutal cult deprogrammer, while in Joshua: Then and Now (1984), again adapted by Richler from one of his novels, he was a writer whose once-perfect life is in tatters. Switching Channels (1987), a comedy set at a TV station, was scuppered by the last-minute replacement of Michael Caine with Burt Reynolds, who sparred constantly with his co-star, Kathleen Turner. Kotcheff never had another box-office success after Weekend at Bernie's, and drifted instead into directing TV movies, though he had a sizeable small-screen hit on his hands as the producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which he ran between 2000 and 2012. In his 2017 autobiography, he proudly described his filmography as a 'gumbo', and said: 'The only thing I have never done is what others expected me to do.' He is survived by his second wife, Laifun Chung, and their children, Alexandra and Thomas, and by three children, Aaron, Katrina and Joshua, from his marriage to the actor Sylvia Kay (one of the stars of Wake in Fright), which ended in divorce. William Theodore Constantine Kotcheff, film director, born 7 April 1931; died 10 April 2025
Boston Globe
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood' and ‘Weekend at Bernie's' director, dies at 94
He eventually reached Hollywood to work with stars such as George Segal and Jane Fonda in the crime farce 'Fun with Dick and Jane' (1977) and Nick Nolte in the football satire 'North Dallas Forty' (1979). Advertisement Yet the project Mr. Kotcheff cited with special pride was 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' a 1974 coming-of-age drama starring Richard Dreyfuss in a film that became widely regarded as helping put Canada on the cinema map. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Kotcheff said he found a Hollywood producer interested in the script, which was based on a 1959 eponymous novel by his London collaborator and former housemate, Mordecai Richler. The story, set in Montreal, follows the overheated ambitions and moral compromises of a young man from a working-class Jewish family. Mr. Kotcheff had already directed a television adaptation for 'Armchair Theatre' in 1961 on Britain's ITV network. This time, the Hollywood producer suggested changes. 'Why not move it to Pittsburgh?' Mr. Kotcheff told the University of Toronto Magazine in 2013. 'And maybe we could make Duddy a Greek boy.' Advertisement 'It was my friend's book,' he continued. 'I couldn't do that to him. Duddy, a Greek boy? In Pittsburgh?' Mr. Kotcheff cobbled together enough funding for a low-budget shoot in Montreal, and the film found a home in art cinemas and festivals - winning the top prize in Berlin in 1974. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote that 'Duddy' stood apart 'from the usual literature about unscrupulous ambition, most of which is pious and dull and goes without saying. There's not a bad performance in the film.' ''The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' is the axis on which my career and, in many ways, my life, has rotated,' Mr. Kotcheff wrote in his 2017 autobiography, 'Director's Cut: My Life in Film,' co-authored by journalist Josh Young. Mr. Kotcheff headed to London in 1957 seeking a bigger creative arena than the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he had landed his first job after college. He moved into British television for 'ITV Playhouse' and other shows, working on teleplays that included adaptations of Eugene O'Neill's 'Emperor Jones' (1958) and Jean Cocteau's 'La Voix Humaine,' or 'The Human Voice,' in 1966, starring Ingrid Bergman. During a live 'Armchair Theatre' broadcast of the nuclear bomb drama 'Underground' in 1958, a lead actor, Gareth Jones, died of a heart attack. Mr. Kotcheff and the rest of the cast finished the show, improvising around Jones's lines. Mr. Kotcheff's cinema debut came in 1962 with the comedy 'Tiara Tahiti,' starring James Mason and John Mills (filmed in Tahiti), and he followed with other films in the 1960s including the racial drama 'Two Gentlemen Sharing' (1969), which was shot in London. Advertisement The door to the United States was still closed. During the anti-Communist 'Red Scare' in the early 1950s, Mr. Kotcheff was turned back at the border in Vermont, accused of being part of a leftist book club in Canada. Then in 1968, a musician burned an American flag at an event in London's Royal Albert Hall, where Mr. Kotcheff was part of the production team. That put him on another no-entry list, he said. 'First a communist and now a flag burner!' he wrote in his memoir. An offer came from Australia to direct 'Wake in Fright,' a 1971 psychological boiler about a teacher (Gary Bond) who becomes stranded in a mining camp and falls under the grip of hard-drinking locals who force him to take part in a sadistic kangaroo hunt. The film received a cool reception in Australia over the unflattering portrayal of outback life. The movie later was hailed as a landmark moment in Australia's new wave cinema that included director Peter Weir's 1975 drama 'Picnic at Hanging Rock.' (Mr. Kotcheff allowed Weir to shadow him on the 'Wake in Fright' set.) 'Wake in Fright' was rarely seen for decades after the distributor went bankrupt. A screening at the Toronto Film Festival was arranged in 2009, marking its return. 'Powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing,' wrote film critic Roger Ebert in 2012. 'It comes billed as a 'horror film' and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic." Mr. Kotcheff was cleared to enter the United States in the early 1970s and found Hollywood studios eager to make offers. He made a niche in wry comedies such as 'Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?' (1978). Meanwhile, he and Michael Kozoll (co-writer of the NBC police series 'Hill Street Blues') crafted a script based on a 1972 book, 'First Blood,' by Canadian-born writer David Morrell. Advertisement After several actors turned down the lead role, Mr. Kotcheff said he suggested Stallone, star of the 'Rocky' franchise, to play the Vietnam veteran John Rambo, who stalks a small-town sheriff (Brian Dennehy) and his deputes after being abused and humiliated. 'First Blood' was a box office hit in 1982 and led to four movies with the Rambo character. Mr. Kotcheff turned down a chance to be part of them. 'They offered me the first sequel, and after I read the script I said, 'In the first film he doesn't kill anybody. In this film he kills 75 people,'' Mr. Kotcheff told Filmmaker magazine in 2016. 'It seemed to be celebrating the Vietnam War, which I thought was one of the stupidest wars in history.' In the late 1980s, Mr. Kotcheff heard about an off-the-wall story in the works by scriptwriter Robert Klane. It became 'Weekend at Bernie's' (1989), a romp about two salesmen (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who try to keep up a ruse that their dead boss (Terry Kiser) is still alive and well and enjoying the fun at his beach house in the Hamptons. (Mr. Kotcheff makes a cameo as father of one of the young men.) Some critics called the movie a one-joke slog. But fans embraced the freewheeling insanity, giving the film a place among '80s wisecracking comedies including 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986). Mr. Kotcheff said he passed on working on 'Bernie's' sequel. He quipped that he had run out of dead-guy gags. Advertisement William Theodore Kotcheff was born in Toronto on April 7, 1931. His parents worked various jobs and sold homemade moonshine during the Depression. Mr. Kotcheff said his father changed the spelling of his last name from Tsochev after arriving in Canada from Bulgaria. As a child, Mr. Kotcheff watched from backstage while his parents and friends put on plays in Bulgarian. 'They'd write their own scripts. Often the actors, working other jobs, didn't have time to learn the lines,' he recalled. He received a degree in English literature from Toronto University in 1952 and joined the state broadcaster as a stagehand, rising to become a director. His other films included the Western 'Billy Two Hats' (1974), starring Gregory Peck and Desi Arnaz Jr.; the POW drama 'Uncommon Valor' (1983), starring Gene Hackman, and 'Joshua Then and Now' (1985), a Gatsby-style tale based on a novel by Richler. Mr. Kotcheff joined the NBC crime series 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' as executive producer in 2000 and remained for more than a decade. His marriage to Sylvia Kay ended in divorce. He then married Laifun Chung and had two children together. Other survivors include three children from his first marriage; four grandchildren; and a brother. The original script for 'First Blood' ended with Rambo's suicide. During a test screening, the audience hated that conclusion, Mr. Kotcheff said in an interview with the Directors Guild of America. Weeks earlier, he and Stallone had privately worked out a rewrite with Rambo surviving - which unintentionally opened the way for sequels. 'I said, 'Well, boys,'' Mr. Kotcheff recalled, ''I just happen to have this other ending here in my back pocket.'' Advertisement
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's and Wake in Fright, dies aged 94
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: 'He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.' In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff's work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: 'He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.' The son of Bulgarian/Macedonian immigrants to Canada, Kotcheff was born in 1931 in Toronto, and raised in the city's Cabbagetown district. After earning a degree in Ebglish literature from Toronto University, Kotcheff joined a fledgling CBC in the early 1950s, part of a remarkable generation that included Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Sidney J Furie and Alvin Rakoff. Like them, he felt he had to move away to further his career, and Kotcheff came to London in 1957 and began making TV plays for strands including Hour of Mystery, Armchair Theatre and ITV Playhouse. These included an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1958, written by Terry Southern and starring Kenneth Spencer and Harry H Corbett, No Trams to Lime Street in 1959, written by Alun Owen, and – infamously – Underground in 1958, in which actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during a live transmission. Kotcheff moved into features in the early 60s, making his debut with the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, following it up with Life at the Top, the sequel to hit kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, in 1965, and the race-issue drama Two Gentlemen Sharing in 1969. In the same period Kotcheff also directed the original production of Lionel Bart's celebrated musical Maggie May, which premiered in 1964. Kotcheff continued to work in TV, directing Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine in 1967, and achieving perhaps his high point with a contribution to Play for Today in 1971, starring Patricia Hayes as a homeless alcoholic in Edna the Inebriate Woman. However his career took an unexpected detour in the same year with the cult Australian film Wake in Fright, for which he was offered the job to direct despite never having visited the country. Despite being poorly received in its home country due to its uncompromising depiction of a brutally cruel Australian outback, including notorious scenes of a kangaroo hunt, Wake in Fright was selected for the Cannes film festival and went on to become celebrated as a landmark film, both as part of the Australian new wave of the 1970s and as a pioneering entry in the 'Ozploitation' subgenre. In 1974 Kotcheff finally realised his ambition of making a successful Canadian feature film with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; starring Richard Dreyfuss, it was adapted from a novel by his friend (and former housemate in London) Mordecai Richler, with whom he had worked on a string of British productions – including an Armchair Theatre adaptation of Duddy Kravitz in 1961. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and was a major commercial success in Canada. As a result, Hollywood took notice and Kotcheff was hired to make satirical comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a successful married couple who turn to crime after Segal is fired. It was a hit on its release in 1977, and Kotcheff followed it up with another Segal comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Nick Nolte American football film North Dallas Forty. Kotcheff then released arguably his most influential film: the Sylvester Stallone action film First Blood, which had numerous directors and lead actors attached to it before Kotcheff offered the role to Stallone and production got underway in 1981. A depiction of an emotionally embattled Vietnam veteran, First Blood was a sizeable hit and spawned two sequels, including Rambo: First Blood Part II which became a career-defining success for Stallone in 1985. Kotcheff had another big success at the end of the decade: the dead-body comedy Weekend at Bernie's, starring Andrew McCarthy. After the failure of the Tom Selleck comedy Folks! in 1992, Kotcheff returned to TV, and in 2000 joined the long running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as executive producer and occasional director, where he remained for 12 seasons. Kotcheff was married twice, to Sylvia Kay between 1962 and 1972, and to Laifun Chung, who survives him.
