US: Success in Hollywood came late to the American film director Robert Altman, who has died aged 81. By the time he became a celebrity at 45, it seemed he had already settled into the role that suited him - the grand old man, cantankerous and wayward.
He was compared to Fellini, as a creator of a cinematic world entirely his own, to Welles and to Stroheim. Like the latter two, he knew spectacular decline after glory, but unlike them, had a journeyman's pragmatism that allowed him to carry on, and more than once to resurface triumphantly.
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, of English-German-Irish origins and a background he described as "renegade Roman Catholic". His father, an insurance broker, was an inveterate gambler; Altman grew up largely in the company of two sisters, his mother and grandmother. In 1941, he attended the Wentworth military academy in Lexington, Missouri, then joined the US army air force.
After the war, he spent some time in New York, trying his hand as an actor, a songwriter and a fiction writer; one of his stories became the basis of Richard Fleischer's film Bodyguard (1948). He also briefly set up a business tattooing dogs for identification purposes. A long apprenticeship in cinema began when he returned to Kansas City and made industrial films; he made some 60 shorts, then tried his hand at commercials, and in 1953 made his first venture into television.
In 1955, Altman made his first cinema film, The Delinquents. He then spent six years in television. After a spell working on "ColorSonics", prototype pop video clips, Altman returned to cinema with the space drama Countdown (1967), and the psychological thriller That Cold Day in the Park (1969). He then took up an offer to direct a war satire that had been turned down by 15 others. M*A*S*H (1970), set in a military hospital during the Korean war, remains Altman's biggest commercial success, and immediately crystallised his style and attitude.
Nashville (1975) was a panoramic view of America's country music capital. Altman's fall from Hollywood grace came in 1980 with Popeye. The far more ambitious Short Cuts (1993), wove Raymond Carver's short stories into a sprawling canvas of the petty comedies and tragedies of the Los Angeles lifestyle. Altman's last decade was as active, mixed and surprising as any in his career. A late-period return to form came with Gosford Park (2001).