Ted Kotcheff, who directed more than two dozen movies including the Rambo sequel First Blood, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and Weekend at Bernie’s 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.
Born on April 7, 1931, in Toronto, Kotcheff as a producer and director in 1950s and ’60s TV. By the 1970s, he was focused on longform project, including several made-for-TV movies. His big-screen directing career bloomed in 1974 with a pair of features: the Gregory Peck-Desi Arnaz Jr. western Billy Two Hat and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss, who was hot off George Lucas’ American Graffiti.
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 funny — Robert Morley.
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 scored the sought-after directing gig for First Blood (1982), the first sequel to Rambo, starring Sylvester Stallone the titular battling Vietnam vet. 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.
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