William Theodore Kotcheff (born April 7, 1931) is a Bulgarian-Canadian film and television director, writer and producer, known primarily for his work on British and American television productions, such as Armchair Theatre and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He directed numerous successful films including the Australian Wake in Fright (1971), action films such as the original Rambo movie First Blood (1982) and Uncommon Valor (1983), and comedies like Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), North Dallas Forty (1979), and Weekend at Bernie's (1989). He sometimes is credited as William T. Kotcheff, and resides in Beverly Hills, California. Due to his ancestry, Kotcheff has Bulgarian citizenship. Early life Kotcheff's name was registered in official documents as William Theodore Kotcheff in Toronto, where he was born into a family of Bulgarian immigrants, who changed their last name from Tsochev () to Kotcheff for convenience. His father was born in Plovdiv, and his mother was of Macedonian Bulgarian background, from Vambel, today in Greece, but grew up in Varna, Bulgaria. Career Canadian television 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. Kotcheff was the youngest director on the staff of the CBC, where he worked for two years on shows such as General Motors Theatre, Encounter, First Performance and On Camera. British television In 1958, he left Canada to live and work in the United Kingdom. He was soon followed by his compatriot Sydney Newman, who had been the Director of Drama at the CBC and then to the United Kingdom to take up a similar position at ABC Weekend TV, one of the franchise holders of the ITV network who also produced much of the nationally networked programming for the channel. At ABC, Newman as producer of the popular Armchair Theatre anthology drama programme, on which Kotcheff worked as a director between 1957 and 1960. Kotcheff was responsible for directing some of the best-remembered instalments in the series. During Underground, transmitted live on 30 November 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. More successfully, Kotcheff also directed the following year's