Robert Altman Biography
Robert Altman was an unusual and independent American film director who explored innocence, corruption, and survival themes in his films. He was born on February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, and passed away on November 20, 2006, in Los Angeles, California. His first and most considerable financial success, the antiwar comedy M*A*S*H, is possibly his most well-known work (1970).
Altman, a wealthy insurance executive’s son, came from a well-known Kansas City, Missouri, family. He attended the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, from his junior year of high school until the start of his undergraduate studies. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, serving as a pilot from 1945 to 1947.
After a failed business venture and a brief stay in Los Angeles, Altman accepted a position with the Calvin Company in Kansas City, where he produced many commercials. He filmed The Delinquents, a drama on juvenile delinquency, in Kansas City in 1957. Tom Laughlin was among the cast members (later the star of the 1970s cult film Billy Jack).
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The James Dean Story, a documentary that was co-directed by Altman and George W. George (the son of cartoonist Rube Goldberg), That movie, which came out two years after the actor passed away, introduced Altman to the television world, where he would spend many years directing episodes of shows like Combat, Bonanza, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, among others.
Altman produced a series of short films in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, he also directed the television movie Nightmare in Chicago. But it was in 1967 that he helmed another motion picture, the painstakingly constructed space thriller Countdown (1968), starring James Caan and Robert Duvall as astronauts.
That Cold Day in the Park (1969), an ominous modern gothic drama starring Sandy Dennis as a disturbed spinster who brings home a young drifter, had Altman travel to Canada for its filming.
The American cinema industry had started to become fixated with big-concept blockbuster movies by the early 1980s, and Altman’s direction of Paramount’s high-profile musical Popeye (1980), which starred Robin Williams in the title role, looked to have maintained the director in the mainstream of Hollywood.
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When the movie didn’t make the kind of significant profits the Company had anticipated, it didn’t seem to matter that Altman was a strange choice for the project.
After that, the big studios abandoned Altman because they thought his style of filmmaking was too avant-garde, iconoclastic, and ultimately unmarketable. Altman consequently spent the 1980s concentrating on more compact projects, many of which were low-budget stage play adaptations.
He spent 19 days filming Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a play he had directed on Broadway, using Super 16-mm cameras. Cher, Sandy Dennis, and Jack Black all starred.
While Secret Honor (1984), shot on 16-mm film at the University of Michigan, captured Philip Baker Hall’s one-person show in which he ranted and raved as Richard Nixon, Streamers (1983), adapted by David Rabe from his Broadway play, focused on a group of army recruits waiting in their barracks for the call to Vietnam.
The claustrophobic drama Fool for Love was converted into a film in 1985, with Sam Shepard playing one of the key characters. In 1987, Altman adapted Christopher Durang’s play Beyond Therapy. He also directed The Laundromat (1985) for Canadian television.
O.C. & Stiggs, a teen comedy, had signalled a brief return to work for a major studio (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), but it remained on the shelf for a considerable amount of time before being released in 1985.
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The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988) for CBS, the groundbreaking HBO political satire Tanner ’88 (1988), a collaboration with cartoonist Garry Trudeau that focused on the campaign of a presidential candidate played by Cillian Murphy and featured interactions with real-life politicians, and Vincent & Theo (1990), which started as a miniseries for European television, were among the most notable of Altman’s television work during this time.
Until his passing in the early 21st century, Altman continued to work as a filmmaker. One of director Robert Altman’s latter works that were most financially successful featured Richard Gere as a charismatic gynaecologist who treats aristocratic society scions in Dr T & The Women (2000).
The murder mystery/comedy of manners hybrid Gosford Park (2001), filmed in an English country manor in the early 1930s, won Altman his final career-long Academy Award nomination for best director. The movie received the best picture nomination as well. The Company (2003), an episodic analysis of one season of the Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet company, came next.
A Prairie Home Companion (2006), based on Garrison Keillor’s well-known radio program, was Altman’s last motion picture.
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FAQs
Where was Robert Altman born?
Robert Altman was born on February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, and passed away on November 20, 2006, in Los Angeles, California.
When was was Robert Altman born?
Robert Altman was born on February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, and passed away on November 20, 2006, in Los Angeles, California.
When did Robert Altman pass away?
Robert Altman was born on February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Missouri, and passed away on November 20, 2006, in Los Angeles, California.
