At 80, Ted Kotcheff to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award after an illustrious career in TV, movies
Canadian producer and director Ted Kotcheff will be receiving the Directors Guild of Canada's Lifetime Achievement Award.
By: Martin Knelman Entertainment, Published on Fri Oct 28 2011
At 80, Ted Kotcheff is a majestic lion in winter, and on Saturday night he will be honoured with a lifetime achievement award from the Directors’ Guild of Canada.
I will be presenting the award to him, 38 years after I first met him in Montreal on the set of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — one of the best movies ever made in this country. He had returned to Canada after 15 years in London, at the age of 42, to direct a film based on the novel by his friend, Mordecai Richler.
“Mordecai knew I had a deep understanding of the book,” he told me.
Released in 1974, that movie marked a segue from Act One of the Kotcheff story to Act Two. He hoped after Duddy to get offers to make movies in Canada, possibly settling in Toronto, his hometown, where, as the hungry and ambitious son of immigrants, he had served his own apprenticeship, as raucous, funny and dramatic as Duddy’s.
Instead the tempting offers came from south of the border. In Hollywood he became known for big budget movies like Fun With Dick and Jane, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Weekend at Bernie’s and North Dallas 40.
Among the stars he directed: Jane Fonda, Nick Nolte, Robert Morley, Sylvester Stallone, Gene Hackman, Brian Dennehy, Kathleen Turner, Burt Reynolds, George Segal and Christopher Reeve.
It was 12 years before he returned to Montreal to film another Richler novel, Joshua Then and Now.
For more than three decades, home has been a rambling, light-filled, hillside mini-castle in Beverly Hills, overlooking all of L.A. — where he and his second wife, Laifun Chung, raised their two children. (He also has three older children from an earlier marriage.) That house is where 150 friends assembled in April for his 80th birthday bash.
For the past dozen years, Kotcheff has been a bicoastal man, working and living much of the time in New York, where he was executive producer and driving force behind Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
But before all that he was a kid from Cabbagetown (where he was born “when it was still a slum”) and lived in various Toronto neighbourhoods for the first 26 years of his life. And those formative Toronto days were what Kotcheff, a witty raconteur, vividly recalled over coffee this week.
His father was Bulgarian and his mother Macedonian; he has a younger brother, Tim, a former TV news exec.
Although he wasn’t Jewish, Kotcheff was once called a “dirty Jew” by a fellow worker at one of the restaurants where he took part-time jobs as a teenager.
Soon after graduating in English lit from U of T in 1952, Bill Kotcheff — as he was known up to that time — got a job as a stagehand at the CBC in the early days of TV. Because there were too many other guys on the set named Bill, his boss decided the new recruit (whose middle name was Theodore) would be called Ted. It stuck.
At the CBC, Kotcheff learned the skills that would carry him through his career. After jumping from stagehand to story editor and director of live dramas produced by Sidney Newman, Kotcheff realized that to achieve his ambition he would have to leave.
“In those days, making good meant going elsewhere, as it did for Norman Jewison and Arthur Hiller. I found the experience of going abroad exhilarating.”
What were his proudest achievements?
He named two. One is Wake in Fright, a 1969 classic made in the Australian outback, recently rediscovered and restored. The other is The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
I asked why he recently ended his long stint running SVU.
“After 12 seasons and almost 300 shows I was feeling burnt out,” he replied. “Then my leading man (Chris Meloni) and my chief writer and partner (Neil Baer) left, so I was in the position of having to reinvent the wheel.”
Now Kotcheff is a free man but he avoids the word “retirement.” There are still movies he wants to make — and the book he knows he must write about his amazing life.
