Robert Altman

Was voted the 17th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

Profiled in "Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly", E.M. Walker, D.T. Johnson, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Made his London theatrical debut in early 2006 directing Arthur Miller's play "Resurrection Blues" at the Old Vic under the aegis of Kevin Spacey, the Artistic Director of the venerable London company. Altman chose an eclectic cast for the Miller play featured, including Maximilian Schell, James Fox (who replaced John Wood before previews), and American movie actors Matthew Modine and Jane Adams. The English critics panned "Resurrection Blues", partly due to the clash in acting styles of the disparate cast. Adams walked out after a matinée on April 5, 2006, and was replaced by her understudy for subsequent performances. No explanation was given for her departure from the production. The play was scheduled to close a week early in mid-April due to poor ticket sales. Altman claimed after the poor debut of the play that he was not very familiar with the script, and didn't really understand the play. Critics said that his confusion obviously affected the cast, many of whom seemed not to understand the play, and some of whom seemed to have trouble remembering lines. While not an outright debacle, the play is another relative failure characterizing Spacey's troubled tenure as Old Vic chief.

He designed a watch called "Time to Reflect" for Swatch in 1995 to commemorate the centenary of the birth of cinema.

Directed both Susannah York and Shelley Duvall to the Best Actress Award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. York winning for her role as Cathryn in Images (1972), and Duvall for her portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux in Three Women (1977).

While working on McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), he and Warren Beatty hated each other so much that Beatty later admitted that, had he produced the film himself, he would have killed Altman.

From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for MASH (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success.

Son, Matthew R. Altman was adopted at birth in 1966.

Worked with (the late) Vic Morrow on the TV series Combat! (1962), with Vic's daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh in several films including Short Cuts (1993), and with Vic's ex-wife (and Jennifer's mother) Barbara Turner on The Company (2003).

Son, Robert Reed Altman, with Kathryn Reed, was born in 1960.

His episodes of Bonanza (1959) often starred the Hoss character played by Dan Blocker and frequently were humorous.

His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co. , and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show.

He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater.

, who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects.

After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co.

Stepdaughter, Konni Corriere (with Reed), born 1946.

In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24.

In the recent past, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (founded in 1935) were second in prestige only to the Academy Awards (and some actors and filmmakers such as double Oscar-winner Glenda Jackson considered it a superior honor) and were a major influence on subsequent Oscar nominations. The Golden Globe Awards, which were plagued by scandals related to its small, unrepresentative voting body and to self-dealing with subsequent awardees, had been forced off the air by the Federal Communications Commission and were regarded as something of a joke by more serious cinephiles. During the 1976 presidential election year, Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville (1975) won Best Picture and Supporting Actress (Lily Tomlin), and Altman was named the top director by the NYFCC. All failed to repeat at the Academy Awards (though Keith Carradine won an Oscar for Best Song.) Altman -- discussing Nashville (1975)'s loss of the Best Picture Oscar to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) earlier that year -- characterized the NYFCC Awards as the 'New York primary' leading up to the Oscar 'election'. Continuing with the metaphor in his August 1976 Interview with Bruce Williamson in "PLAYBOY Magazine" (Vol. 23, Iss. 8), Altman said that "Cuckoo's Nest" had had an inside advantage as it had won the 'California primary' (the Golden Globes). At the time, the Golden Globes, though a joke in terms of their integrity, were still a potent predictor of eventual Oscar success (and would come to be the second-most important bellwether of the Academy Awards by the 1980s and '90s).

Being a great admirer of German actress-singer Ute Lemper, he planned to cast her in a remake of Mata Hari (1931), but the movie never came about. He instead gave her a (memorable) part in Ready to Wear (1994).

Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B. C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College.