Robert Altman, ground breaking director, dead at 81

Robert Altman , the director of such classic films as "M*A*S*H" and "Nashville" and one of the great Hollywood mavericks, died Monday night of complications from cancer at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 81.

Mr. Altman was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, five times as a director and twice as a producer. Though he never won, he received an honorary Oscar in March for "a career," as the prize citation put it, "that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike." Mr. Altman also won the New York Film Critics award for best director three times.

"Altmanesque" long ago entered the vocabulary of American film. It referred to movies with large ensembles and interlocking narratives that took a skeptical view of contemporary society. Films ranging from "Boogie Nights" to "Crash," which won the Academy Award for best picture of 2005, are unimaginable without Mr. Altman's example.

Perhaps no major American filmmaker so consistently demonstrated such unpredictability in content or quality. "I don't like to repeat myself because I'm afraid I'd be late for work," Mr. Altman said in a 2001 Globe interview. "My biggest thrill is going into territory that I haven't really been in before."

His taste for risk-taking meant Mr. Altman experienced great failure as well as great success. That success was almost entirely critical; "M*A*S*H" was the only one of his more than 30 feature films to be a smash hit. As Pauline Kael , Mr. Altman's most notable champion, once wrote: "When Altman succeeds, he magically pulls a rabbit out of his hat. When he fails, it looks as if he never had anything in that hat."

Indeed, such flops as "Brewster McCloud" and "Quintet" inspired as much derision as "Nashville" did praise.

But after a career downturn starting in the second half of the '70s, Mr. Altman rebounded in the early 1990s. "A Prairie Home Companion, " Mr. Altman's most recent film, was released in June.

"When I spoke with him last week, he seemed impatient for the future," Meryl Streep, who starred in the movie, said in a statement yesterday. "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.

"What a gent, what a guy, what a great heart," she added. "There's no one like him and we'll miss him so."

Garrison Keillor, who co-wrote and starred in the film, said yesterday that Mr. Altman's love of moviemaking clearly came through on the set.

"He loved the chaos of shooting and the sociability of the crew and actors -- he adored actors -- and he loved the editing room and he especially loved sitting in a screening room and watching the thing over and over with other people," Keillor said in a statement to the Associated Press.

In accepting his honorary Oscar, Mr. Altman revealed that a decade earlier, he had been the recipient of a heart transplant. And the director's production company acknowledged yesterday that he had been living with cancer for the last 18 months, which included the "Prairie Home" shoot.

Still, representatives said the director's death came as a surprise, as he was in preproduction on a film he planned to shoot in February.

Mitchell Zuckoff, a professor of journalism at Boston University who was collaborating with Mr. Altman on his memoirs, saw him a few weeks ago in New York.

"He was every bit still the hard-changing, smart, funny, insightful man who made those incredible and iconoclastic films," Zuckoff said in a telephone interview. "He was charging around, excited as hell because Meryl Streep had just signed for his next movie."

For all the diversity of his output, Mr. Altman's hand was always unmistakable. That's true whether the work was a thriller ("The Gingerbread Man" ), Western ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller" ), detective story ("The Long Goodbye" ), live-action cartoon ("Popeye" ), biopic ("Vincent & Theo" ), cable series ("Tanner '88" ), ballet film ("The Company" ) or movie about jazz ("Kansas City"). The words "a Robert Altman film" don't simply designate authorship; they also describe something very like a genre unto itself.

In Mr. Altman's movies, there is a consistent offhandedness, a general blurriness of affect. No one has ever used overlapping dialogue more successfully; his films have a constant aural buzz. He also achieved the visual equivalent through his fondness for medium and long shots, frequent use of zoom lenses, and highly mobile camera.

Mr. Altman liked to keep the screen in flux. One way of doing this was to make sprawling ensemble pieces. "The cast is larger than the audience," he joked of "Gosford Park, " which has 30 major roles. It was a remark that could be applied to at least a dozen other Altman titles. "It's like painting a mural," he said of his approach to filmmaking in the 2001 Globe interview. "I just have to know how big a wall I've got."

With his openness to improvisation, Mr. Altman's movies feel less scripted than enacted. This helps account for why his films, when they succeed, can seem so fresh and vital; it is also why, when they fail, they can seem lazy and self-indulgent.

Either way, it is one of the reasons actors loved to work with him. Lauren Bacall appeared in two of Mr. Altman's less impressive films, "Health " and "Ready to Wear. " Yet she spoke for many actors when she wrote that the idea of working with him was "an automatic go, absolutely, just tell me when."

The son of an insurance salesman, Robert Bernard Altman was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Feb. 20, 1925. His parents were B.C. Altman and Helen Altman . During World War II, he served as a B-24 pilot in the Pacific theater. He briefly attended the University of Missouri after the war, then began making industrial films, documentaries, and commercials in Kansas City.

"My first attraction to Hollywood, to the movies, was for girls," Mr. Altman said in that Globe interview. "That's what interested me." He sold a feature script, "Bodyguard, " that was produced in 1948. He twice moved to Los Angeles, seeking film work, but each time returned to Kansas City. Finally, in 1957, he caught on in Hollywood with a low-budget feature, "The Delinquents, " and a documentary, "The James Dean Story. "

Over the next decade, Mr. Altman worked on some 300 hours of network television programming as a director, producer, or writer. Among the two dozen series he worked on were "Bonanza, " "Combat!, " "Peter Gunn, " and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents. " The combination of industrial work in Kansas City and numerous television episodes gave Mr. Altman one of the most extensive and thorough apprenticeships of any American filmmaker.

Giving up television, he made two unsuccessful feature films in the late '60s, "Countdown " and "That Cold Day in the Park. " Then, after 15 other directors had turned it down, he was offered a project about a mobile Army surgical hospital during the Korean War.

It was, of course, "M*A*S*H," and the resulting film's blend of irreverence and realism, comedy and gore helped make Mr. Altman one of the signature filmmakers of the '70s. Between 1970 and 1980, he made no fewer than 15 movies.

Mr. Altman maintained that productivity during the '80s, though his reputation was at low ebb. He worked in theater and opera, as well as returning to television. "The bitter entanglement of art and commerce," Kael once wrote, is Mr. Altman's "lifelong theme," and it seemed for a time as though commerce had won.

Nonetheless, Mr. Altman made plain with the 1992 success of "The Player ," an iconoclastic yet ultimately affectionate look at Hollywood, that his powers had not diminished. A year later he released "Short Cuts, " to further acclaim, and in 1994 the Directors Guild of America honored Mr. Altman with its D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award .

One of the few constants in Mr. Altman's constantly shifting career was the Sandcastle 5 name for his production company, which he used for nearly 25 years. "Making these films is like building sandcastles," he said in the Globe interview. "You make them, with your friends, and then you sit up, admire your work, and drink a beer. Then the tide comes in and there's nothing left."

Mr. Altman leaves his wife, Kathryn Reed Altman; six children, Christine Westphal, Michael Altman, Stephen Altman, Connie Corriere, Robert Reed Altman, and Matthew Altman; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Memorial services are being planned.