Ted Kotcheff, the versatile, two-time Palme d’Or nominee who directed more than two dozen movies including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and Wake in Fright and exec produced hundreds of episodes of Law & Order: SVU during a six-decade career, died Thursday. He was 94.
Family members confirmed the news to Canada’s The Globe and Mail.
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Born on April 7, 1931, in Toronto, Kotcheff began his career as a producer and director in 1950s and ’60s TV there. He became an important member of the 1960s fraternity of filmmakers in England, distinguishing himself with the films Life at the Top and Two Gentlemen Sharing. He also won a BAFTA TV Award in 1972 for the BBC drama Play for Today.
By the 1970s, he was focused on longform projects, including features and several made-for-TV movies. He helmed and co-wrote the Australia-set 1971 thriller Wake in Fright, starring Gary Bond and Donald Pleasence, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. “It left me speechless,” Martin Scorsese once said of the pic. Said critic Roger Ebert called it, “Powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing.”
Kotcheff would earn another Palme nom for his 1985 dramedy Joshua Then and Now, starring James Woods and Alan Arkin.
A master of gentle satire, his big-screen directing career bloomed in 1974 with a pair of features: the Gregory Peck-Desi Arnaz Jr. western Billy Two Hats and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss, who was hot off George Lucas’ American Graffiti. Duddy Kravitz premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the coveted Golden Bear.
Kotcheff then broke big, directing the memorable George Segal-Jane Fonda crime comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, which became one of the biggest box office hits of 1977. He followed that up with the wildly underrated and underseen Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), another crime comedy again starring Segal along with Jacqueline Bissett and an enormous — and enormously droll and funny — Robert Morley.
Said Deadline’s Peter Bart, who produced Fun with Dick and Jane and was a longtime friend of the filmmaker: “Ted Kotcheff brought a true wit and humanity to his films. He could evoke laughter at our foibles with Weekend at Bernie’s or at our frailties in Fun with Dick and Jane. Wherever he worked, he brought great humanity to his work and stirred great affection among his actors.”
The filmmaker got his first big-screen writing credit with his next directing effort, 1979’s gritty, funny and poignant North Dallas Forty, which starred Nick Nolte and Mac Davis as the aging stars of a fictional pro football team (cough-Dallas Cowboys-cough). The dramedy about the behind-the-scenes lives, loves and pain of professional athletes rattled some cages with its hard-hitting depictions of alcohol and pain-drug abuse and solidified Kotcheff as a filmmaker to be reckoned with.
But his biggest successes were still to come.
Kotcheff also directed First Blood (1982), starring Sylvester Stallone, which would launch the Rambo franchise. It was an instant hit, spending three consecutive weeks atop the domestic box office. The actioner also is notable for being the first big Hollywood movie to be released in China, three years later. Kotcheff was not involved in the Rambo sequels.
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Next came the military action pic Uncommon Valor (1983), starring Gene Hackman, Patrick Swayze and Robert Stack, which Kotcheff also produced; the Burt Reynolds-Kathleen Turner-Christopher Reeve comedy Switching Channels (1988); an the Kurt Russell-Kelly McGillis-Lloyd Bridges drama Winter People (1989).
Kotcheff then directed perhaps his most popular film, the oddball comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, which starred Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman as unsuspecting pawns in a mob feud that left their company’s titular CEO dead. The twist: They have to pretend the guy (played by Terry Kiser) is still alive. Wild high jinks ensue as they traipse around with the dressed-up body in an effort to dodge another mobster’s wrath. It was followed by a 1993 sequel, sans Kotcheff.
The film’s premise and, well, execution left many critics cold, but would become something of a cult classic on VHS and TV. A quarter-century later, Kotchoff — who also had a small role in the movie — and screenwriter Robert Klane would sue MGM and Twentieth Century Fox over what they alleged were withheld profits from Weekend at Bernie’s.
Kotcheff would direct several other films during the 1980s and ’90s before joining the behind-the-scenes staff of a burgeoning smash TV series.
In 1999, he boarded the first season of Dick Wolf’s NBC spinoff Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as a co-executive producer. Elevated to exec producer for Season 2, Kotcheff would remain in that role through the smash crime drama’s 13th season in 2011-12, also directing more than a half-dozen episodes. The record-breaking series starring Mariska Hargitay remains on the air.
“Ted was an integral part of the SVU family for over 13 years,” EP and creator Wolf told Deadline. “He was not only a great producer and director, he was also a close friend. I will miss him.”
The Directors Guild of Canada honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and three years later received an Academy Board of Directors Tribute at the Canadian Screen Awards.
In his retirement, Kotcheff published three books of poetry, with some of his poems reflecting his childhood in Canada as part of an immigrant family from Bulgaria. His memoir, Director’s Cut, was published in 2017.
Survivors include his second wife, Laifun Chung; their daughter Alexandra, a film director; and their son Thomas, who has written scores for several movies and is a performing pianist. He also had three children from a previous marriage to actress Sylvia Kay, who appeared in Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright.
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