He sometimes is credited as William T. Kotcheff, and resides in Beverly Hills, California. Due to his ancestry, Kotcheff has Bulgarian citizenship.
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 (Bulgarian: Цочев) 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.[citation needed]
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.

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