Ted Kotcheff

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Ted Kotcheff (sometimes credited as William Kotcheff or William T. Kotcheff; born April 7, 1931 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian film and television director, who is well known for his work on several high-profile British television productions and as a director of films such as First Blood.

After graduating in English Literature from the University of Toronto, Kotcheff began his television career at the age of twenty-four when he joined the staff of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with television still very much in its infancy in the country. Kotcheff was the youngest director on the staff of the CBC, where he worked for two years on shows such as General Motors Theatre before in 1958 leaving Canada to live and work in the United Kingdom.

He was inspired by his compatriot Sydney Newman, who had been the Director of Drama at the CBC and had moved across to the UK to take up a similar position at ABC Television, one of the local franchise holders of the ITV network who also produced much of the nationally-networked programming for the channel. At the ABC, Newman oversaw as producer the popular Armchair Theatre anthology drama programme, and he employed Kotcheff as a director on this series, for which he directed several plays between 1958 and 1960.

Kotcheff was responsible for helming some of the best-remembered instalments in the Armchair Theatre strand, although for very different reasons. Underground, transmitted on November 28, 1958 saw him having to cope with one of his actors, Gareth Jones, dying while in make-up between two of his scenes. As the play was being transmitted live, Kotcheff had to hastily improvise a way around the loss of one of his main cast, with Newman telling him to "shoot it like a football match", following whatever action happened on set with the improvising surviving cast members. More successfully, Kotcheff also directed the following year's No Trams to Lime Street by Welsh playwright Alun Owen, who later went on to write The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night in 1964.

As well as directing for Armchair Theatre during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kotcheff also directed several productions for the theatre, and in 1962 directed his first feature film, Tiara Tahiti. He went on to direct other features during the decade, including Life at the Top (1965) and Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969).

In 1971, he directed the Australian film Outback, which won much acclaim and was the Australian entry at the Cannes Film Festival. The same year he returned to television, directing the Play for Today production Edna, the Inebriate Woman for the BBC, which won him a British Academy Television Award for Best Director. In 2000, the play was voted one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century in a poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute.

In 1972, he returned home to Canada, where he directed several films including the adaptation of his friend and one-time roommate Mordecai Richler's novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival making it the first Canadian film to win an international award. He directed many other films throughout the 1970s and 80s, most in the United States, with perhaps the best-known being the Sylvester Stallone feature First Blood in 1982.

In the 1990s he returned to directing for television, working on various American series such as The Red Shoe Diaries and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Kotcheff now lives in Beverley Hills with his wife and two children when he is not on the set of Law & Order in New York.