Ted Kotcheff, the genre-hopping Canadian filmmaker known for helming Rambo movie “First Blood” and comedies including “Weekend at Bernie’s,” has died at 94.
The Toronto native died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, just days after celebrating his birthday, his daughter Kate Kotcheff confirmed.
“He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character and he was so knowledgeable about so many different things,” said Kate on Friday, reached over the phone from Mexico.
“One of his great talents was people would sit around and he’d tell the most incredible stories. He was almost like the sort of character that doesn’t really exist much in the world anymore.”
Over his career that spanned about six decades, Kotcheff amassed a wide variety of credits, including as director of the 1974 classic “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” an adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel, and the 1992 Tom Selleck dramedy “Folks!”
“I think his legacy will be that he was a director who could turn his hand to anything,” said Kate, who works as a documentary filmmaker.
Kotcheff was raised in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood during the Great Depression. In a 2017 interview with The Canadian Press, he recalled that his Bulgarian father and Macedonian mother were so poor they couldn’t afford coal or wood to heat their home.
One bitter winter night, a nearly two-year-old Kotcheff nearly froze to death. Thankfully, a doctor showed up in time to save him. “I was blue and I could hardly breathe. My mother woke up and saw me – this blue, frozen piece of meat – and she screamed,” he said.
Kotcheff began his career with the CBC in the 1950s, directing TV dramas including “General Motors Theatre” and “First Performance.”
With Canada’s film industry still in its infancy, Kotcheff moved to England in the late 1950s, where he became roommates with Richler in London. It was during that time that Richler wrote “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.”
“I read the whole book at one sitting … and said, ‘Mordecai, not only is this one of the great Canadian novels ever written, but one day I’m going to go back to Canada and make a film out of it,’” he said.
“We laughed like crazy because of course at that time there was no Canadian film industry whatsoever.”
The resulting Quebec-shot film gave Kotcheff his big break in Hollywood in the 1970s.
Kotcheff also helmed the seminal 1971 Australian New Wave film “Wake in Fright,” starring Gary Bond as a stranded schoolteacher descending into madness.
“I think ‘Wake in Fright’ was his greatest achievement in film,” says Kate, whose mother and Kotcheff’s wife at the time, Sylvia Kay, also starred in the thriller. She recalls living in Australia for nine months while her father shot the film.
“The movie really says something about Australian culture and particularly men at that time, and how Australia was in the places that weren’t the big cities.”
Kate says her father always had a clear vision long before stepping on set.
“His conviction as a director was very clear. He always knew what his edits were in his head before he’d shoot.”
With 1982’s “First Blood,” Kotcheff introduced audiences to the fictional soldier John Rambo, marking Sylvester Stallone’s first post-“Rocky” hit.
It was “primarily a Canadian film,” Kotcheff told The Canadian Press.
“It’s based on a Canadian book written by David Morrell, it had a Canadian director, we shot it in Hope, British Columbia, and it had a Canadian crew.”
More recently he was executive producer for hundreds of episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
A documentary about his life, “The Apprenticeship of Ted Kotcheff,” is currently in the works.
Kate says the secret to Kotcheff’s versatility was his unwavering focus on story above all else.
“He was very well read and quite literary. For him, it was always about the story and the characters, so it didn’t really matter what genre it was,” she says.
“I suppose those were the days when a good director could direct anything.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 11, 2025.
