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 (AP) - Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent
satirist behind "M-A-S-H," "Nashville" and "The Player" who
made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story
conventions, died at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5
Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.

      The director died Monday night, Joshua Astrachan, a producer at
Altman's Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York City, told The
Associated Press.

      The cause of death wasn't disclosed. A news release was expected
later in the day, Astrachan said.

      A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most
recently for 2001's "Gosford Park," he finally won a lifetime
achievement Oscar in 2006.

      "No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,"
Altman said while accepting the award. "I'm very fortunate in my
career. 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."

      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,
Altman worked ceaselessly since his anti-war black comedy
"M-A-S-H" established his reputation in 1970, but he would go for
years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a
hit.

      After a string of commercial duds including "The Gingerbread
Man" in 1998, "Cookie's Fortune" in 1999 and "Dr. T & the
Women" in 2000, Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain
for 2001's "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 Altman's biggest box-office success
since "M-A-S-H."

      Besides best-director, "Gosford Park" earned six other Oscar
nominations, including best picture and best supporting actress for
both Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith. It won the original-screenplay
Oscar, and Altman took the best-director prize at the Golden Globes
for "Gosford Park."

      Altman's other best-director Oscar nominations came for
"M-A-S-H," the country-music saga "Nashville" from 1975, the
movie-business satire "The Player" from 1992 and the ensemble
character study "Short Cuts" from 1993. He also earned a
best-picture nomination as producer of "Nashville."

      No director ever got more best-director nominations without
winning a regular Oscar, though four other men - Alfred Hitchcock,
Martin Scorsese, Clarence Brown and King Vidor - tied with Altman
at five.

      In May, Altman brought out "A Prairie Home Companion," with
Garrison Keillor starring as the announcer of a folksy musical show
- with the same name as Keillor's own long-running show - about to
be shut down by new owners. Among those in the cast were Meryl
Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee
Jones.

      "This film is about death," Altman said at a May 3 news
conference in St. Paul, Minn., also attended by Keillor and many of
the movie's stars.

      He often took on Hollywood genres with a revisionist's eye,
de-romanticizing the Western hero in 1971's "McCabe and Mrs.
Miller" and 1976's "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting
Bull's History Lesson," the film-noir gumshoe in 1973's "The Long
Goodbye" and outlaw gangsters in "Thieves Like Us."

      "M-A-S-H" was Altman's first big success after years of
directing television, commercials, industrial films and generally
unremarkable feature films. The film starring Donald Sutherland and
Elliott Gould was set during the Korean War but was Altman's thinly
veiled attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

      "That was my intention entirely. If you look at that film,
there's no mention of what war it is," Altman said in an
Associated Press interview in 2001, adding that the studio made him
put a disclaimer at the beginning to identify the setting as Korea.

      "Our mandate was bad taste. If anybody had a joke in the worst
taste, it had a better chance of getting into the film, because
nothing was in worse taste than that war itself," Altman said.

      The film spawned the long-running TV sitcom starring Alan Alda,
a show Altman would refer to with distaste as "that series."
Unlike the social message of the film, the series was prompted by
greed, Altman said.

      "They made millions and millions of dollars by bringing an
Asian war into Americans' homes every Sunday night," Altman said
in 2001. "I thought that was the worst taste."

      Altman never minced words about reproaching Hollywood. After the
Sept. 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 attacks.

      "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that
unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.

      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.

      While critical of studio executives, Altman held actors in the
highest esteem. He joked that on "Gosford Park," he was there
mainly to turn the lights on and off for the performers.

      The respect was mutual. Top-name actors would clamor for even
bit parts in his films. Altman generally worked on shoestring
budgets, yet he continually landed marquee performers who signed on
for a fraction of their normal salaries.

      After the mid-1970s, the quality of Altman's films became
increasingly erratic. His 1980 musical "Popeye," with Robin
Williams, was trashed by critics, and Altman took some time off
from film.

      He directed the Broadway production of "Come Back to the Five
and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," following it with a movie
adaptation in 1982. Altman went back and forth from TV to
theatrical films over the next decade, but even when his films
earned critical praise, such as 1990's "Vincent & Theo," they
remained largely unseen.

      "The Player" and "Short Cuts" re-established Altman's
reputation and commercial viability. But other 1990s films -
including his fashion-industry farce "Ready to Wear" and "Kansas
City," his reverie on the 1930s jazz and gangster scene of his
hometown - fell flat.

      Born Feb. 20, 1925, Altman hung out in his teen years at the
jazz clubs of Kansas City, Mo., where his father was an insurance
salesman.

      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 such series
as "Bonanza" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

      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.

      When he received his honorary Oscar in 2006, Altman revealed he
had a heart transplant a decade earlier.

      "I didn't make a big secret out of it, but I thought nobody
would hire me again," he said after the ceremony. "You know,
there's such a stigma about heart transplants, and there's a lot of
us out there."

Gallery

The stars come back to St. Paul for Prairie Home premiere

Hollywood remembers a town that time forgot

Director Robert Altman's comments

Keillor remembers friend and partner Robert Altman

Film director Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist who
made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story
conventions, has died at the age of 81.

Director Robert Altman dead at 81

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