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She was an English actress and writer who co-created a ’70s TV drama series that became one of the first British hits on this side of the Atlantic. He was a Canadian-born film and TV director whose eclectic résumé included one of the most iconic action movies of the 1980s. MovieFanFare would like to moment to remember the passing over the weekend of Jean Marsh, the steadfastly loyal domestic servant Rose Buck of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Ted Kotcheff, who helmed Sylvester Stallone’s debut appearance as John Rambo, the 1982 thriller First Blood.
Born in 1934 in the Stoke Newington region of London, Jean Marsh was interested in performing at an early age. Her screen debut came at 13 as a sewing girl in the 1947 film adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Jean played opposite Laurence Olivier in a 1959 TV filming of The Moon and Sixpence and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 20th Century-Fox’s 1963 epic Cleopatra. Marsh did TV work in the U.S. and the U.K. in the ’60s, from playing a robot in the The Twilight Zone episode “The Lonely” and teaming with Roger Moore in The Saint to being featured in Danger Man, I Spy, and UFO.
Doctor Who fans will remember her as Sara Kingdom, a Space Security agent sent to murder the Doctor (William Hartnell) only to join him in the TARDIS to defeat “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” before she herself was killed. In 1970 she was the insane Mrs. Rochester in a production of Jane Eyre that starred George C. Scott and Susannah York. It played theatrically in Britain and on NBC here the following year.
In 1969 Marsh and fellow actress Eileen Atkins approached producers with an idea for a TV comedy titled Behind the Green Baize Door, about two housemaids in Victorian England. The concept was switched to drama and further characters–both the servants and the aristocrats they tended to–were added, and the revamped program–now called Upstairs, Downstairs–premiered on Britain’s ITV network in 1971. When the show came to America three years later as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, it was a ratings hit for the fledgling network. Along with playing parlourmaid Rose (a role which won her a Best Actress–Drama Emmy in 1975), Marsh would co-write all 68 episodes during the series’ five-season run. She and Atkins would come up with another popular drama, 1991-94’s The House of Eliott.
During the 1970s and ’80s Marsh appeared in such movies as Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), the WWII thriller The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and the horror outing The Changeling (1980), which reunited her and Scott. She played the wicked Princess Mombi, who had a closet of interchangeable heads she would use to reflect her mood, in Disney’s 1985 semi-sequel Return to Oz, and in 1988 she stayed villainous as the sorceress Queen Bavmorda in Willow. Ron Howard’s fantasy saga would be her last film role for over 20 years, until she finished her big screen work with a 2010 British crime thriller, The Heavy.
Meanwhile, Jean stayed active in stage and TV work from the ’80s–including a stint as office snitch Roz in the first two seasons of the ABC sitcom version of 9 to 5 and a return to Doctor Who in the 1989 episode “Battlefield”–to the 2000s. She reprised her role as Rose Buck in the 2010-12 revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, but a minor stroke she suffered in 2011 limited her appearances. Named to the Order of the British Empire in 2012, Marsh lived in retirement in London until passing away at 90 from complications linked to dementia on April 13th. Fun Fact: Jean’s links to Doctor Who weren’t just limited to in front of the camera. Her only marriage was to future Third Doctor John Pertwee, from 1955 to 1960.
Producer/director Ted Kotcheff was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1931, the son of Bulgarian immigrants. Graduating from the University of Toronto, Kotcheff went to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1955. After three years with the CBC he went to England and began directing TV shows there, often working with fellow ex-pat Sydney Newman. One of his more intriguing challenges came in 1958 with the anthology Armchair Theatre. During a live broadcast of the drama “Underground,” one of the actors suffered a fatal heart attack off-camera and the rest of his scenes had to be improvised without his presence (ironically, one of Ted’s most popular films 30 years later would handle a similar situation very differently).
Kotcheff’s first feature film directorial effort was Tiara Tahiti, a 1962 South Pacific seriocomedy with James Mason and John Mills. Next was 1965’s Life at the Top, a sequel to the ’59 “Angry Young Man” drama Room at the Top and featuring that film’s Laurence Harvey. A sojourn to Australia would lead to Ted helming 1971’s offbeat Outback odyssey Wake in Fright, which was feared lost for many years and has gone on to achieve cult status.
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He returned to his native Canada for 1974’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which starred Richard Dreyfuss as a young Montrealer looking to get rich quick. Kotcheff’s other ’70s work included Billy Two Hats (1974), with Desi Arnaz, Jr. and Gregory Peck as Old West bank robbers; Fun with Dick and Jane (1976), with George Segal and Jane Fonda as an unemployed couple who turn to (you guessed it) bank robbery; the delicious comedy/mystery Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), with Segal and Jacqueline Bisset; and the Nick Nolte-Mac Davis gridiron romp North Dallas Forty (1979).
Religious cult “deprogrammers” were the focus of Kotcheff’s 1982 drama Split Image, starring James Woods, Peter Fonda, and Karen Allen. That same year the filmmaker put his Outback experiences to good use when he directed Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, the Vietnam vet who finds himself in battle against the lawmen in a remote Pacific Northwest town, in First Blood. The aftermath of the Vietnam War was also the focus of Ted’s next project, the 1983 actioner Uncommon Valor, with Gene Hackman, Fred Ward, and a young Patrick Swayze.
Kotcheff and Woods reteamed for the Canadian-produced comedy/drama Joshua Then and Now (1985), followed in 1988 by Switching Channels, a updating of The Front Page and His Girl Friday which starred Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner, and Christopher Reeve. His final ’80s project was one of his most popular films, the “What do you do with your dead boss’s body?” comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, starring Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, and Terry Kiser as the titular corpse.
Starting in the early ’90s Ted worked more in TV than movies. His final theatrical projects were the generational comedy Folks! (1992), with Tom Selleck, Anne Jackson, and Don Ameche, and the Dolph Lundgren action tale The Shooter (1995). Kotcheff helmed two installments of the hit HBO series Red Shoe Diaries and directed several episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where he also worked as a co-executive producer. The prolific filmmaker passed away in Mexico on April 10, three days after turning 94.