Robert Altman

Robert Altman (1925-2006), American film director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, and innovative feature films. Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and became an apprentice film-maker with the Calvin Company. He directed television programmes in Hollywood in the late 1950s before scoring a surprise hit with the film M*A*S*H in 1970. He became renowned for his unorthodox production methods (the cast and crew lived on the “army camp” set), daring style (overlapping, improvisational dialogue, and semi-documentary-style camerawork and editing), and for his irreverence towards Hollywood genres and authority.

After M*A*S*H, Altman directed a string of well-received films, including McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Images (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), and Nashville (1975). However, he subsequently alienated audiences, industry people, and film critics as his films became increasingly mean-spirited or eccentric, as in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), A Wedding (1978), and Quintet (1979).

Altman closed his Hollywood production centre after Popeye (1980), which made a profit but earned little acclaim. Having directed several off-Broadway plays, he spent most of the 1980s filming stage dramas for art-house audiences or cable television. Notable projects included Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Laundromat (1983), Streamers (1983), and Secret Honor (1984). He also directed Vincent and Theo in 1990.

Altman’s openness to alternative formats reached its peak in Tanner ‘88 (1988), an epic project for cable television. Featuring a fictitious candidate for the 1988 United States presidential nomination, Tanner was written and shot as the real campaign unfolded, with such real-life personages as Senator Robert Dole and Kitty Dukakis, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, mingling with the professional actors. Both Laundromat and Tanner ‘88 won Emmy awards. In 1992 Altman directed The Player, a sardonic Hollywood-on-Hollywood satire that won him the Best Director award at the Cannes Festival and restored him to directorial stardom. That success was followed by Short Cuts (1993), an intricately interwoven multi-character narrative of contemporary mores in Southern California based on the short stories of Raymond Carver, and the less well-received Prêt-à-Porter (1994), a satire on the world of haute couture. In 1996 Altman directed Kansas City, a tragicomedy set in the 1930s, an era of gambling and risk-taking, gangsters and jazz. It was followed by the under-rated thriller The Gingerbread Man (1998), starring Kenneth Branagh and adapted from a story by John Grisham, Cookie's Fortune (1999), starring Glenn Close and Julianne Moore, and Dr. T and the Women (2000). In 2001 he made his first film in Britain, the ironic 1930s murder mystery Gosford Park, which gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Film and won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.

He followed this with The Company (2003), an ensemble piece about a fictional Chicago ballet company, and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a film inspired by the long-running Garrison Keillor radio favourite of the same name. In 2006 Altman directed the British premiere of the late work by Arthur Miller, Resurrection Blues, at London’s Old Vic Theatre. He was nominated Best Director five times by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. He received a lifetime achievement Honorary Academy Award in 2006.