Robert Altman Dies at 81

Robert Altman once summed up his moviemaking career as "one, long film." To fans of his massive body of work, which ranged in scope from M*A*S*H to Gosford Park, it wasn't quite that simple.

The prolific director died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his production company said Tuesday. He was 81.

According to a press release from Sandcastle 5 Productions, Altman's death was caused by complications of cancer, which he had been battling for 18 months. At the time of his death, he was in preproduction on a film that he planned to begin shooting in February.

Over the course of his lengthy career, Altman was a seven-time Academy Award nominee, with five nods in the Best Director category, but he never won until accepting a Lifetime Achievement Oscar earlier this year. (See our photographic retrospective, Robert Altman: A Life in Film.)

"No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have," he 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."

He also used his acceptance speech to reveal that he had had a heart transplant some 10 years earlier from a woman several decades younger.

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

Altman, whose numerous film credits included Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and his most recent release, A Prairie Home Companion, made a career-long habit out of expressing his distaste for Hollywood conventions. After the 9-11 attacks, he even accused Hollywood of inspiring acts of terrorism with its endless glut of violent action movies.

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

His turbulent relationship with Hollywood establishment often made it difficult for Altman to raise the necessary funds for his quirky stable of productions, forcing him to make many of his films on a shoestring budget.

Luckily, his relationships with actors were far stronger, and as a result, big name stars tended to jump at the chance to work with Altman, even at a fraction of their usual pay.

As word spread of the maverick director's demise Tuesday, tributes poured in from many of the actors he directed over the years.

"I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches," Lindsay Lohan said in a statement. "I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years."

Garrison Keillor, who costarred with Lohan in Altman's most recent release, A Prairie Home Companion, stressed the director's intense love for his craft. "He didn't care for the money end of things, he didn't mind doing publicity, but when he was working he was in heaven," Keillor recalled.

Tim Robbins, who appeared in several Altman films, including The Player, Short Cuts and Prêt-à-Porter, called the director a "great friend and inspiration."

"His unique vision and maverick sensibilities in filmmaking have inspired countless directors of my generation and will continue to inspire future filmmakers," Robbins said.

By the Academy's count, Altman directed 86 films, writing 37 of them. Early credits, according to the Internet Movie Database, included How to Run a Filling Station, the sort of industrial short that paid the fledgling director's bills. Moving onto TV in the 1950s, Altman helmed episodes of Bonanza, Maverick and Route 66.

It wasn't until his mid-40s that M*A*S*H, the 1970 black comedy set during the Korean War but speaking the language of the Vietnam War-era audience, distinguished Altman as a feature director.

"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 in a 2001 interview with the Associated Press.

The film inspired the long-running TV series by the same name, of which Altman was no fan.

"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."

A leading maverick of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls decade of film, Altman eavesdropped on politicians and country singers in Nashville, scrutinized family life in A Wedding and took an Old West icon down a notch in Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

Of his later work, the proper British murder mystery of Gosford Park was among Altman's most accessible and successful films at the box office.

"There's no one I’m prouder to have worked with," stated Richard Gere, who starred in Altman's Dr T and the Women. "He was an ecstatic...a magician...a conjurer...a mischievous boy. Perhaps unprecedented."

In 2002, Altman directed five 30-second promo spots for E! Entertainment Television, featuring actors in everyday settings, reenacting scenes from classic films. (E! Online and E! Entertainment are divisions of E! Networks.)

The spots—Altman's first commercial work in the United States since the days before he became a known commodity—featured Dustin Hoffman reciting lines from The Graduate while gazing in a bathroom mirror and tugging at his facial skin to make himself look younger; Eric McCormack delivering lines from The Godfather, as he prepared dinner in his kitchen; Minnie Driver as Hannibal Lecter in a scene from The Silence of the Lambs; Ving Rhames as Robert De Niro in a scene from Taxi Driver; and a clotheshanger-wielding Lisa Kudrow in a spoof of Mommie Dearest.

Altman was born Feb. 20, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father worked as an insurance salesman.

He served as a bomber pilot in World War II, then studied engineering at the University of Missouri, before he began making the industrial shorts that eventually led to his filmmaking career.

Married three times, Altman was the father of five children—two sons from his current marriage to wife Kathryn, and a daughter and two more sons from his two previous marriages. Memorial services were being planned.

Remembering the director she worked with on A Prairie Home Companion, Meryl Streep called Altman a "restless spirit," who was always impatient for the future.

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