LOS ANGELES (AP) — Robert Altman, the irreverent satirist behind “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville” and “The Player,” has died at 81 from complications due to cancer.
The maverick director died Monday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a press release from Mr. Altman’s production company, Sandcastle 5 Productions.
A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001’s “Gosford Park,” he finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar this year.
“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Mr. Altman said while accepting the award. “I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”
Mr. Altman had one of the most distinctive styles among modern filmmakers. He often employed huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue, and filmed scenes in long tracking shots that would flit from character to character.
Perpetually in and out of favor with audiences and critics since his anti-war black comedy “M*A*S*H” established his reputation in 1970, Mr. Altman would go for years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a hit.
After a string of commercial duds in the late ‘90s, Mr. Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain for “Gosford Park.” A combination murder-mystery and class-war satire set among snobbish socialites and their servants on an English estate in the 1930s, “Gosford Park” was Mr. Altman’s biggest box-office success since “M*A*S*H.” He took the best-director prize at the Golden Globes for the film.
Mr. Altman’s other best-director Oscar nominations came for “M*A*S*H,” the country-music saga “Nashville” (1975), the movie-business satire “The Player” (1992) and the ensemble character study “Short Cuts” (1993).
An inveterate genre revisionist, the director de-romanticized the Western hero in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), the film-noir gumshoe in “The Long Goodbye” (1973) and outlaw gangsters in “Thieves Like Us” (1974).
“M*A*S*H” was Mr. Altman’s first big success. The film starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould was set during the Korean War but was Mr. Altman’s thinly veiled attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Mr. Altman never minced words in reproaching Hollywood. After the September 11 attacks, he said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such atrocities. Mr. Altman was written off repeatedly by the Hollywood establishment, and his reputation for arrogance and hard drinking — a habit he eventually gave up — hindered his efforts to raise money for his idiosyncratic films.
The director held actors — unlike studio executives — in the highest esteem, which they reciprocated. Despite shoestring budgets, the director continually landed top-name stars for a fraction of their normal salaries.
“Bob’s restless spirit has moved on,” said 13-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep, who appeared in “A Prairie Home Companion” and co-introduced Mr. Altman to receive his honorary Oscar. “When I spoke with him last week, he seemed impatient for the future. He still had the generous, optimistic appetite for the next thing, and we planned the next film laughing in anticipation of the laughs we’d have.”
Born Feb. 20, 1925, Mr. Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II and studied engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia before taking a job making industrial films in Kansas City. He moved into feature films with “The Delinquents” in 1957, then worked largely in television through the mid 1960s, directing episodes of series such as “Bonanza” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
Mr. Altman and his wife, Kathryn, had two sons, Robert and Matthew, and he had a daughter, Christine, and two other sons, Michael and Stephen, from two previous marriages.
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