Robert Altman

The apprenticeship ran a quarter century and almost none of it looked like art. Altman grew up comfortable in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of an insurance salesman who gambled, took a Catholic education from the Jesuits, and left Wentworth Military Academy in 1943. At 18 he joined the Army Air Forces and flew more than 50 bombing missions as a B-24 co-pilot over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. Home again, he made industrial films and documentaries for the Calvin Company back in Kansas City, some 65 of them, then spent a decade on episodic television — Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Combat!, Maverick — getting thrown off projects for ignoring network orders and hired again the next week. He was 45 before he had a hit.

M*A*S*H arrived in 1970, and behind it came the run that critics meant by Altmanesque: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, and much later The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. The method was concrete. He wired actors with individual radio microphones onto separate tracks, so three conversations could run at once and the viewer had to pick one. He zoomed slowly and kept the camera drifting, finding people rather than framing them. He cast in dozens where others cast in handfuls, and left the structure loose enough for actors to invent inside it.

Then it stopped working, and it stayed stopped for most of a decade. Quintet was derided. HealtH sat on a shelf at 20th Century Fox and barely reached theaters. Popeye took 60 million dollars worldwide in 1980 and still counted as a failure, its Malta shoot soaked in drink and drugs, the director included. In 1981 he sold Lion's Gate Films, the company he had built to keep studios out of his work, and the Malibu house with it. "I had no choice," he told the New York Times. "Nobody was answering the phone." He spent the decade filming plays on almost no money — Streamers, Secret Honor, shot at the University of Michigan with his students as crew. The Player brought him back in 1992, at 67.

Five nominations for best director — M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park — and five losses. On March 5, 2006, the Academy handed him an honorary Oscar instead, and he used the speech to tell the room something none of them knew. He had been living with a transplanted heart for roughly a decade and had told nobody, because he was certain that a director no insurer will cover is a director nobody hires. Then he joked that the award might be premature, since he felt good for another 40 years. He died of leukemia at Cedars-Sinai on November 20, 2006, eight months later.

Robert Altman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• M*A*S*H film
  Palme d'Or at Cannes and the biggest hit he ever had 1970
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller film
  A revisionist Western shot through fog filters and scored with Leonard Cohen songs 1971
• The Long Goodbye film
  Raymond Chandler relocated to the 1970s, with the camera never still 1973
• Nashville film
  Politics and country music, with the songs written by the cast 1975
• The Player film
  The Hollywood satire that ended the exile 1992
• Gosford Park film
  An English country house watched from upstairs and downstairs at once 2001

• 1943 aged ~18 Enlists in the Army Air Forces at 18, straight out of military academy He flew more than 50 bombing missions as a B-24 co-pilot with the 307th Bomb Group over Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.
• 1949 aged ~24 Goes back to Kansas City to make industrial films for the Calvin Company Some 65 of them. The overlapping dialogue started here, on films about football and farm machinery.
• 1957 aged ~32 The Delinquents, made for 60,000 dollars, sells to United Artists for 150,000 It got him out of Kansas City for good and into a decade of television.
• January 25, 1970 aged 44 M*A*S*H opens and takes the Palme d'Or at Cannes More than a dozen directors had passed on the script. Altman was 44 when he shot it.
• June 11, 1975 aged 50 Nashville opens Two dozen characters over five days, and the fullest demonstration of the method.
• 1981 aged ~56 Sells Lion's Gate Films after Popeye and the shelving of HealtH "I had no choice. Nobody was answering the phone."
• April 10, 1992 aged 67 The Player returns him to Hollywood at 67 Best Director at Cannes, from BAFTA and from the New York Film Critics Circle. Not the Oscar.
• March 5, 2006 aged 81 Accepts an honorary Oscar and reveals the heart transplant he had hidden He put it at 10 or 11 years earlier. On his last film, insurers had required Paul Thomas Anderson to stand by as a replacement director.
• November 20, 2006 aged 81 Dies of leukemia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles He was 81 and still developing projects.

• Warren Beatty b. 1937
  Producing Bonnie and Clyde and directing Reds directed
• Pauline Kael 1919–2001
  The New Yorker's film critic from 1968 to 1991, who turned reviewing into a first-person argument and picked the fights that defined the field. championed by
• Roger Ebert 1942–2013
  The first film critic to win a Pulitzer, half of the most famous thumbs in America, and a writer who kept working after cancer took his voice. championed by
• Quentin Tarantino b. 1963
  Director of Pulp Fiction influenced
• Francis Ford Coppola b. 1939
  Director and producer whose landmark films helped define the New Hollywood era and modern American epic filmmaking. contemporary of the same movement
• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. influenced