TED KOTCHEFF
(7 April 1931 - 10 April 2025)
Ted Kotcheff was a producer and director who worked a lot in Canada and in the UK. He began his TV career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at the age of 24. Three years later he moved to England with fellow Canadian Sydney Newman (1917-1997). They joined ABC Weekend TV along with a third Canadian, Alvin Rakoff (1927-2024, q.v.). All three Canadians were from European immigrant families, and they worked at making British television drama more realistic. Whereas the BBC had previously relied on play adaptations, this Canadian triad commissioned new writing. Newman co-created Dr Who and The Avengers on British TV, Rackoff cast Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Alan Rickman in new drama, while Kotcheff directed the Armchair Theatre strand, the ITV Television Playhouse slot and several other series. While in the UK Kotcheff also started making feature films.
William Theodore Kotcheff was of Canadian-Bulgarian extraction, born in Toronto. His father was born in Plovdiv and his mother was from a Macedonian Bulgarian background. Young Ted graduated from University College in Toronto, having majored in English Literature. When he joined the CBC at 24, he was the youngest director on the staff. He moved to the UK in 1957 to work with Newman as a TV drama director. In those days plays went out live and Kotcheff’s baptism of fire came on a Sunday night in 1958 when one of the actors in Underground died on live TV. The show continued with improvisations by the other actors.
The first film that Kotcheff made was Tiara Tahiti (1962), a comedy-drama with James Mason and John Mills. His films always had some kind of interest about them. Life at the Top was the sequel to John Braine’s controversial novel Room at the Top, about a man on his way up in the world. Laurence Harvey repeated his performance from the first film as Joe Lampton. Kotcheff considers Two Gentlemen Sharing the best of his British period, having a racial theme in that a black and a white man were the two gentlemen of the title. At the time (1969) it was not popular and was not released in the UK. Wake in Fright (aka Outback) was made in Australia, based on Kenneth Cook’s novel about a schoolteacher who gets stranded in the Outback and undergoes all kinds of humiliation. The film apparently became lost and was rarely seen until it was remastered in 2004 and gained a new reputation. It was also remade as a TV miniseries in 2017.
After Kotcheff returned to Canada, he made The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz with Richard Dreyfuss as a young Montreal Jew on the make and it seemed to be a shot in the arm for Canadian features, winning the Golden Bear at Berlin. Kotcheff continued his success with Fun With Dick and Jane with George Segal and Jane Fonda, and then with Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, a black comedy with George Segal, Jacqueline Bissett and Robert Morley. North Dallas Forty with Nick Nolte, set in the world of professional football, was well received and proved a box-office hit. First Blood with Sylvester Stallone was the first Rambo film and did extremely well. Switching Channels was a remake of The Front Page with the newspaper office becoming a cable TV newsroom. It starred Kathleen Turner and Burt Reynolds. In Weekend at Bernie’s two insurance agent employees find their boss dead and have to pretend otherwise. Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman were the hapless pair.
Kotcheff made four more features and continued working in TV including the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for which he worked as an executive producer-director from 1999 to 2012. Ted Kotcheff was married to the actress Sylvia Kay from 1962 and they had three children, Aaron, Katrina and Joshua. They divorced in 1972. He married the producer and production designer Laifun Chung in 1985 and they had two children, Alexander and Thomas. On April 10, 2025, Ted Kotcheff died in Mexico of heart failure, just three days after his 94th birthday.
MICHAEL DARVELL