INFLUENTAL DIRECTOR ROBERT ALTMAN DEAD AT 81

Robert Altman, 81, the maverick director of M*A*S*H and Nashville,
films that defined 1970s America and redefined Hollywood
storytelling, died Monday of complications due to cancer at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

At the Academy Awards in March, he collected an honorary Oscar in
recognition of a singular career that included the ensemble drama
Gosford Park as well as the 2006 comedy A Prairie Home Companion.

Although Mr. Altman never won a competitive Academy Award, his five
nominations (for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and
Gosford Park) put him in the rarefied company of Alfred Hitchcock and
Martin Scorsese, who likewise went 0-for-5.

To his critics, Mr. Altman's fragmented narratives, restless camera
and rambling, overlapping voices were antithetical to the crisp
composition and articulated dialogue of the well-wrought film. But
the blurred visuals and muddy sound dizzily conveyed the ferment of
real life. It's hard to think of another director who is a greater
influence on current filmmakers.

Mr. Altman's Short Cuts, a mosaic of 24 interconnected people in Los
Angeles, was an antecedent of Crash, last year's Oscar winner, as
well as of Babel, this year's presumptive nominee.

From the moment Mr. Altman broke through in 1970 with M*A*S*H, his
irreverent satire about an Army medical unit that distilled the
war-is-insane sentiments of Vietnam protesters, he devoted himself
almost exclusively to exposing the foibles and follies of America.

Pioneer of an egalitarian aesthetic, Mr. Altman was militantly
antihero, instead making films about insular professional
communities. Rather than exalt an individual, Mr. Altman focused on
how a character contributed to a team effort, whether in surgery,
show biz, or the upkeep of a country house.

The director explored country musicians in Nashville, fashionistas in
Ready to Wear, and Hollywood wannabes in The Player. Along the way he
provided a revisionist take on virtually every movie genre, from
western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) to detective story (The Long Goodbye)
to musical (Popeye), refreshing timeworn conventions.

Mr. Altman's career conformed to a three-act arc that his free-form
films stubbornly resisted: Success. Fall from Grace. Comeback.

After a long journeyman period directing television shows such as
Combat! and Bonanza, Mr. Altman enjoyed his first feature success
with M*A*S*H, a movie 15 other directors had turned down. It was a
film, quipped the rangy, bearded 6-footer, "that didn't get released
by Fox, but escaped."

The son of an insurance agent so persuasive that "he could sell a
policy to a corpse," Robert Altman was born in Kansas City, Mo., on
Feb. 20, 1925. Educated at Catholic schools and Wentworth Military
Academy, the future filmmaker experimented with sound on a
reel-to-reel recorder.

After a stint in the Air Force as a B-24 pilot, Mr. Altman made his
first pass at Hollywood. Although he was hired as an extra on the
Danny Kaye film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947 and tinkered
on screenplays, he did not gain a toehold in the industry.

He returned to his hometown, where he got hired by a production
company that made educational films. His apprenticeship made him more
attractive to Hollywood, and in 1956 he was hired to direct episodes
of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

A legendary drinker, gambler, philanderer and pothead (he was on the
advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws), Mr. Altman moved from the small screen to the large
with his first major feature, Countdown (1968), a character study of
astronauts, starring Robert Duvall. Because of Mr. Altman's beard and
girth, Hollywood buddies called him "the stoner Santa." Others,
referring to his be-here-now attitude, dubbed him "the prairie Buddha."

Executives at Fox were horrified at the gallows humor of M*A*S*H, in
which Army doctors Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland joked their
way through bloody surgeries. Mr. Altman fought to keep the blood in.
The film was a huge hit.

Although he didn't enjoy another comparable commercial success in the
'70s, Mr. Altman had unprecedented artistic freedom to explore lust
and greed on and off screen. He made The Long Goodbye, with Gould as
private eye Philip Marlowe, California Split (Gould and George Segal
as compulsive gamblers), and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Warren Beatty as a
frontiersman and Julie Christie as a madam).

Mr. Altman's life was as colorful as he steamrolled through six
studios in as many years, dogged by debt, ex-girlfriends and gambling losses.

The high point of the decade was Nashville (1975), a knotty tapestry
of music and politics that presaged Jimmy Carter's election.

Mr. Altman's fall from grace came a few years later with Popeye, a
bizarrely entertaining antimusical with Robin Williams as the
spinach-eater and Shelly Duvall perfectly cast as Olive Oyl.

Though he dabbled in theater (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean) and television (Tanner '88), Mr. Altman spent most
of the '80s self-exiled in Paris, where, one observer noted, "he was
revered to a degree somewhere between Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke."

Mr. Altman rebounded in 1990 with Vincent & Theo, a profound
commentary on art and commerce that focused on Vincent van Gogh and
his art-broker brother. The director cemented what he called "my
fourth comeback" with The Player (1993), a scathing account of a
fast-buck Hollywood where some would kill to get ahead.

The film lampooned the show-biz mainstream Mr. Altman dismissed when
he said: "We're not against each other. They sell shoes and I make gloves."

At 70, he had a heart transplant, which he kept quiet until he
accepted his honorary Oscar earlier this year.

With a career that shone brightest at dawn and twilight, Mr. Altman
came back from surgery to make one of his best films, Gosford Park, a
look at 1930s British aristocracy and the servants who kept their manor houses.

Well before he made his final film, A Prairie Home Companion, Mr.
Altman inadvertently wrote his own epitaph.

"Retirement? You're talking about death, right?"

Mr. Altman is survived by his third wife, Kathryn Reed, six children,
12 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.