Trivia

He was born in Toronto to a family of Bulgarian immigrants, who changed their last name from Tsochev to Kotcheff for convenience.

Given name is Velichko Todorov Kotcheff.

Got his start at the Canadian Broadcasting Co. in 1952 at the dawn of the TV age, first as a stagehand and then, at 24, as the country's youngest drama director.

Worked for a slaughterhouse and for Goodyear Tire & Rubber while attending college.

In 1968 while directing a fundraiser at Royal Albert Hall that protested the practice of apartheid in South Africa, a musician accidentally set a U.S. flag on fire, getting him into more trouble with American authorities. He wasn't allowed back into the United States until 1972.

After he directed Laurence Harvey and Jean Simmons in the drama Life at the Top (1965), Michelangelo Antonioni called and asked him for suggestions on how to take 20 minutes out of Blow-Up. He gave him about 18 minutes' worth of cutting suggestions, Antonioni used almost all of them.

Mordecai Richler was his roommate in London.

He won the Golden Bear at the 1974 Berlin International Film Festival for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

During Underground, transmitted live on November 30, 1958, Kotcheff was required to cope when one of the actors, Gareth Jones, playing a character who was to die of a heart attack, suddenly died of one himself, off-camera, while between scenes, leaving Peter Bowles and others to improvise.

After graduating in English Literature from University College, 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 in its infancy.

Given his Macedonian heritage, Kotcheff served on the board of directors of the Macedonian Arts Council.

Ted Kotcheff was a Canadian-Bulgarian director and producer of film and television.

He directed the original 1964-65 West End production of the musical Maggie May at the Adelphi Theatre, which won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Score of the Year and the Critics' Poll as Best New British Musical.

Kotcheff was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Achievement in Direction, a Gemini Award for Best Direction in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series, and twice for the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or.

A 1953 trip to New York City, his first to the U.S., to see Broadway plays, ended with him being arrested by border agents after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police betrayed him to the FBI for a brief association with a left-wing book club. He was briefly jailed, branded a communist and sent back north.