Oded Kotler

Kotler was born in Tel Aviv in 1937, the youngest of Hannah and Pinhas Kotler’s three children.[1][4] His parents were avid theatergoers, and he accompanied them to performances at Habima and Ohel from childhood.[1][4] At the religious elementary school Bilu, he particularly valued opportunities to perform in school plays.[1]

At about thirteen, he organized an amateur filmmaking club on his parents’ roof that developed into a youth theater group.[4] At fourteen, he founded Kla’im, which soon received municipal recognition as Tel Aviv’s youth theater.[1] Its members included Gila Almagor, Oded Teomi, Ilai Gorlitzky, and Avraham Mor.[1]

At seventeen, Kotler joined Ohel Theater as its youngest actor, making his professional debut in Tea and Sympathy.[1][3] He belonged to a younger generation entering a company that had been a leading theatrical institution before statehood but was losing ground to Habima and the Cameri during the 1950s.[5]

After military training, Kotler served in the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command entertainment troupe, performing for soldiers during the Sinai Campaign, also known as Operation Kadesh, and later becoming the troupe’s commander.[1] During his service, he continued studying theater with teachers including Lola Shentzer, Ruth Harris, and Miriam Bernstein-Cohen, and directors Peter Fry and H. Kylos.[1] His early performance work also included singing with Batzal Yarok and participating in radio dramas.[3]

After three years of military service, Kotler joined the Cameri Theater, where his leading roles included parts in Woyzeck, Twelfth Night, and The Inn of the Spirits.[1] On the Cameri stage he met poet and playwright Tirza Atar, who was nineteen at the time; they married in 1961 and traveled together to New York to study acting.[6] Kotler received a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater and completed his studies with distinction.[1]

Returning to the Cameri as both actor and director, Kotler made his directing debut with Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, a production that attracted critical praise and audience success.[1] His directing work also included a 1964 Cameri production translated by Atar.[6]

Seeking an independent theatrical framework that would express what he called “the Israeli spirit,” Kotler left the Cameri in the mid-1960s and co-founded Actors’ Stage, also known as Bamat Ha-Sahkanim.[1] His collaborators included Amnon Meskin and Laura Rivlin, while the group brought to Haifa Theater also included Ilan Toren.[7] Financial difficulties eventually led the group to join Haifa Theater.[1]

Kotler led Haifa Theater from 1970 to 1978, emphasizing original Israeli plays that addressed the country’s contemporary social and political life.[3] The arrival of the avant-garde Actors’ Stage group brought young actors and directors into the municipal company.[8] Kotler also became the theater’s managing director in 1976.[7]

His artistic program helped move the theater toward original work rather than an eclectic repertory.[1][3] Playwrights whose work developed under his leadership included Yehoshua Sobol, Yosef Bar-Yosef, Hillel Mittelpunkt, Dani Horowitz, Yaakov Shabtai, and Hanoch Levin.[1] Haifa Theater became a professional home and launching point for Israeli playwrights and creators, including A. B. Yehoshua.[7]

Kotler returned to lead Haifa Theater in 1990, continuing his support for Israeli playwriting during a second term in the 1990s.[1][8] During this period, he gave Edna Mazia her first stage opportunity and directed her Games in the Backyard, which became one of Israeli theater’s most-watched productions.[1] His directing repertoire also included Hefetz, Popcorn, and The Work of Life, while his acting and directing work included Chinese I Speak to You.[3][9]

Kotler received the 1967 Cannes Best Actor Award for Uri Zohar’s Three Days and a Child, adapted from a short story by A. B. Yehoshua.[2] In the psychological drama, he played a Jerusalem mathematics teacher asked to care for a young child for three days, confronting his ambivalence toward the son of his former girlfriend.[2][10]

Having returned to Israel shortly after the Cannes premiere, Kotler learned of the award while traveling to a performance in Haifa.[10] During a café stop in Binyamina, fellow actor Alex Ansky heard the news on the radio and called it out to him; patrons raised a toast, and the Haifa audience later greeted Kotler with flowers.[10]

His other film appearances included Every Bastard a King and My Michael, directed by Dan Wolman and adapted from Amos Oz’s novel.[9] On television, he appeared in Ugly Esti and its sequel, and in 2010 played Yaron Zehavi, commander of the Hasamba group, in Hasamba Generation 3.[9]

In 1977, Kotler was invited to establish Israeli Television’s Drama Department with several collaborators.[1] His subsequent directing work for television included a six-episode series about family life and documentaries about Naomi Polani and the Tarnegolim troupe, and about Mikhail Bulgakov and The Master and Margarita.[1]

In 1980, Kotler conceived and founded the Akko Festival of Alternative Theater, seeking opportunities for artists whose voices were not finding expression on established stages.[1] Explaining the initiative, he said: “I was tired of institutional theater. I wanted to do something more experimental to inspire the younger generation with a new creative impetus.”[11]

The festival developed into an institution for alternative and street performance.[11] Its fortieth-anniversary edition in 2019 featured about sixty Israeli and international troupes over four days, with an anticipated attendance of approximately 120,000 visitors.[11] For the anniversary, Kotler adapted and directed The Curse.[1]

After his first Haifa Theater term, Kotler established the Neve Tzedek Theater Center, receiving the Knesset Speaker’s Prize for his contribution to it.[1] He also participated in a successful public campaign to abolish censorship of plays.[1] His institution-building extended to the Jerusalem-based Laboratory Theatre, and he later served in the Cameri’s ensemble and artistic leadership.[3]

Following professional development in the management of regional theaters in the United States, Kotler accepted Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek’s invitation to direct the Israel Festival.[1] He held the position from 1985 to 1990, opening the festival to major international creators including Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, Martha Clarke, Ariane Mnouchkine, Pina Bausch, and William Forsythe.[1] From 2011 to 2013, he was artistic director of the Herzliya Ensemble.[3]

In 2007, Kotler staged Tamir Greenberg’s verse play Hebron in a joint Cameri–Habima production.[1] His later theater work included directing plays by Savyon Liebrecht at Beit Lessin, acting in The Banality of Love and The History Boys, and playing Professor Higgins in the Israeli Opera’s My Fair Lady.[1] He also directed Nava Semel and Ella Milch-Sheriff’s A Rat’s Laughter, receiving the Yosef Milo Award for Best Director.[1]

Kotler taught acting at Kibbutzim College, Beit Zvi, and other institutions in 2010 and 2011.[1] In 2012, he and Amnon Meskin founded the Actors Studio within Stage Workshops, inspired by New York’s Actors Studio.[1] Professional actors met under his guidance to develop their craft without charge.[1]

His later projects included The Birthday Party, Abigail’s Party, and Fool for Love, and he played Tiresias in Oedipus the King at Notzar Theater.[1] In early 2017, he appeared in Unwanted Child, a monodrama directed by Nola Chilton and based on Yael Gvirtz’s biography of Yitzhak Ben-Aharon.[3] His work toward the 2021–2022 season included preparations for adaptations of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire.[1]

Kotler published his autobiography, Many Days Will Not Cover, in 2016, followed three years later by his first novel, The Journey: A Personal Diary by Dave Segal.[3] In a 2022 interview, he described theater as an art that should deliver an artistic and emotional shock and open audiences to emotional depths beyond everyday experience.[4] He argued for demanding plays and artistic exploration rather than a repertoire relying principally on musicals, comedies, and melodramas.[4]

His official Israel Prize biography records that he lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Oredit, and has three children and five grandchildren.[1]

Kotler received the Israel Prize in theater and dance in 2022, recognizing his achievements as an actor, director, and artistic director over more than sixty years of stage work.[3] The award recognized the institutions he founded and managed, their contribution to making space for diverse voices, and their role in developing original Israeli playwriting.[3]

His contribution combined the promotion of playwrights within established repertory theater with the creation of alternative frameworks for experimental work.[1] At Haifa Theater, he helped develop original drama rooted in Israeli contemporary life; through the Akko Festival and other independent institutions, he created additional opportunities for artists outside established stages.[1]

His other honors include the Margalit Prize, the Council for Culture and Art Prize, five David’s Harp awards, the Rosenblum Prize, the Israel Theater Prize for lifetime achievement, a lifetime achievement award from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, and the EMET Prize for his longstanding contribution to Israeli theater.[1]

In June 2015, Kotler’s address to an emergency gathering of artists in Jaffa became widely known as the “beasts speech.”[9] Speaking amid debate over cultural funding and possible restrictions on artistic expression, he addressed Culture Minister Miri Regev and evoked a silent world in which a “herd of beasts” followed Likud’s thirty Knesset seats.[9] Regev and other critics interpreted the passage as an insult to Likud voters, and the speech drew condemnation across the political spectrum.[3][9]

Kotler subsequently maintained that he had been speaking about censorship and the impoverishment of culture rather than attacking voters.[9] Accounts of his response include both an apology and his insistence that he did not regret the remark because its subject was freedom of expression.[12] The remark also prompted criticism of his 2022 Israel Prize selection, which MK Itamar Ben-Gvir called “shameful.”[12]