Robert Altman, the most audacious, most applauded and a satirist behind M*A*S*H, ‘Nashville’ and ‘The Player’, which made him the influential director of the 20th century, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.
He died at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, due to complications of cancer, which he was suffering from last 18 months. Altman’s last movie ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ was released in June and was already working on another movie due to be launched next year.
When he received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006, Altman revealed he’d 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.”
Altman, a five-time Academy Award nominee for best director has been quoted as “a force of nature’ by Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 2001’s “Gosford Park.”
He was known for his bluntness that caused him to fall in and out of favor in Hollywood during his nearly six decades in the industry, he was perhaps even better known for his influential method of assembling large casts and weaving in and out of their story lines, using long tracking shots and intentionally having dialogue overlap.
One can watch the mesmerizing use if this technique in his most recent “A Prairie Home Companion,” starring Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan.
He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him. ‘What is a cult?’ Mr. Altman said. ‘It just means not enough people to make a minority.’
