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 thrillerWake in Fright(1971), which Martin Scorsese called “disturbing” and “beautifully calibrated”, be responsible also for the lively coming-of-age comedyThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz(1974) starring a young, zingy Richard Dreyfuss? How could one film-maker leap from the grittyFirst 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), starringGregory 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 asArthur HillerandNorman Jewisonhad 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 ofMichelangelo 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 byJeremy Sandford, also responsible for Ken Loach’sCathy Come Home(1966), it starredPatricia Hayesas 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 friendMordecai Richlerfrom 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 andGeorge Segalas 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), withGene Hackmanas 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 withBurt 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 actorSylvia 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