Robert Altman, the maverick director who earned a reputation as one of America's most original filmmakers with landmark movies such as MASH, Nashville, and McCabe and Mrs Miller, has died. He was 81.Altman, who never stopped producing and directing films, died of complications due to cancer Monday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said a spokesman for Altman's Sandcastle 5 Productions Company in New York City Tuesday.
Over the years, Altman earned five Academy Award nominations for best director - for MASH, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and, most recently, Gosford Park. His latest film was this year's A Prairie Home Companion, an ensemble comedy with music based on the Garrison Keillor radio show.
"Bob's restless spirit has moved on," said Meryl Streep, one of the many stars who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion.
"I have to say, when I spoke with him last week, he seemed impatient for the future. He still had the generous, optimistic appetite for the next thing, and we planned the next film laughing in anticipation of the laughs we'd have."
Elliott Gould, who made MASH and four other films with Altman, said Tuesday: "He was the last truly great American film director in the tradition of John Ford. I'll always be grateful to him for all the opportunities he gave me. He was my friend."
Asked what made Altman a great director, Gould laughed and told Los Angeles Times: "He was a riverboat gambler; he dared to show life taking its course. He was quite an innovational artist."
In March, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored him with an honorary Oscar, Altman revealed that he had had undergone a heart transplant 11 years earlier.
"I got the heart of, I think, a young woman who was about in her late 30s," he told the audience. "And so, by that kind of calculation, you may be giving me this award too early - because I think I've got about 40 years left on it. And I intend to use it."
Altman had said he viewed the honorary Oscar "as a nod to all of my films. To me, I've just made one long film."
A former Kansas City industrial film director who launched his Hollywood career in television in the late 1950s, Altman became a major filmmaking force in 1970 with MASH.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
