Success in Hollywood came late to Robert Altman, and 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.
The actor Elliott Gould compared him to General Custer: "He always seemed on the verge of some sort of eternal defeat." Yet for observers of his career, an Altman low always presaged an eventual return to the heights.
Robert Altman was, born in 1925 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 as a B-24 pilot. 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 to make industrial films; he made some 60 shorts, then tried his hand at commercials, and in 1953, made his first venture into television with the series Pulse of the City.
In 1955, Altman made his first cinema film, The Delinquents, followed in 1957 by a documentary, The James Dean Story, which brought him his first acclaim. He briefly directed on the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, then spent six years in television, on series including Bonanza, The Millionaire and The Troubleshooters. Here Altman evolved a creative style and a flair for conflict with producers. He saw the adventure series Whirlybirds as "underground work", for the chance it afforded him to liven up programmes to his own agenda. He was fired from the war series Combat for including an anti-war script, and caused a scandal with an episode of the small-town drama series Bus Stop, which was felt to be too explicitly brutal.
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 already been turned down by 15 other directors. MASH (1970), set in a military hospital during the Korean war, remains Altman's biggest commercial success, and immediately crystallised his style and attitude, with its corrosive stance towards American institutions, its farcical humour and distinct elements of misogyny - and at times, over-readiness to tilt at easy targets.
The improvisatory style he developed on this film brought him into conflict with his leads Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, who distrusted what they considered an anarchic approach; Gould later admitted he had misunderstood Altman's "pursuit of the imperfect moment". The film, which cost $3 million, earned 20th Century Fox some $40 million; it was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and later spawned a spin-off TV series which Altman felt was a travesty of the original.
Immediately afterwards, Altman initiated a pattern that would run throughout his career - following a successful film with another that almost seemed calculated to cause him setbacks. Brewster McCloud (1970), a mix of broad counter-culture satire and fairytale, lost him much of the credit MASH had won. Its follow-up, McCabe and Mrs Miller (1970), remains one of the masterpieces of the period, recasting the heroic myth of the old west as a sombre farce of failure and corruption, so mercilessly that John Wayne denounced it as corrupt. Neglected by Warners, it was at first dismissed, until championed by Pauline Kael, who persuaded several fellow critics to recant. The similarly iconoclastic The Long Goodbye (1973) revived Raymond Chandler's honorable detective Philip Marlowe as an anachronistic sleepwalker in 70s Los Angeles.
Nashville (1975) was a panoramic view of America's country music capital, featuring two dozen lead characters - singers, politicians, media people, hangers-on. It was generally received, like many Altman films, as an allegory of America, but could also be seen as his most extensive attack on Hollywood and the hopeless dreams it sustains in its consumers. Few mainstream American films had flown so defiantly close to the limits of narrative cinema, with Altman attempting to give the impression that things were happening entirely under their own steam. Actors were encouraged to develop their own parts, even write their own songs. Altman later referred to the experience as "trying to paint a mural in which the horses keep moving"; but conversely, he remarked that while his films seemed to just happen, everything always happened in a very controlled way.
Commercially, however, Altman's star continued to wane. Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), a Brechtian satire of Western myths, fared badly amid the self-congratulation of Bicentennial Year, and Health (1979) was never properly released, becoming one of Altman's several lost, films - another being the futuristic Quintet (1979), which mystified even his devotees.
Throughout this period, however, Altman showed a flair for executing wilfully uncommercial ideas. The low-key, cryptic Three Women (1977) was based on a dream. A Wedding (1978) originated when he jokingly told a reporter that for his next project he would simply film a wedding. Altman described the result as "a docudrama", in keeping with his rather disingenuous explanation of his work: "I create an event, then shoot it as if I have no control over it." What gave him a degree of control was the use during the 70s of a floating repertory company of regular players including Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Murphy, and - most closely associated with Altman - Shelley Duvall.
Altman's fall from grace with Hollywood came in 1980, with the big-budget Popeye. At the time, the bizarre metamorphosis of Duvall and Robin Williams into cartoon characters mystified critics and public alike, and the film was regarded as a flop, even though it has continued to earn on video and DVD. But it has stood up as a perverse flight of fancy, and now can be seen as a precursor of the big comic-book adaptations of the 80s and 90s.
Popeye came as a further blow to Altman's already precarious standing in Hollywood, hardly improved by his willingness publicly to criticise people he disliked - stars, producers, screenwriters and critics. In 1981, he was forced to sell his production company Lion's Gate; only two years earlier he had expanded it into a full-scale studio, and used it to further the careers of directors Robert Benton, Robert M. Young, and his most illustrious protege Alan Rudolph, whose films he has continued to produce/
The 80s began badly. Altman's Broadway stage production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, was critically savaged; in 1983, he directed a teenage farce, O.C. and Stiggs, which was not released until four years later.
Against the odds, Altman reinvented himself as a director of chamber cinema, making low-budget films from stage plays. Foremost was Secret Honor (1984), which he made while teaching at the University of Missouri; a one-man show for a benighted, paranoid Richard Nixon, it remains one of America's most daring political films. Other small-scale films were Streamers, Fool For Love, and a return to Come Back to the Five and Dime, which vindicated his earlier interest in the play. Briefly moving his base to Paris in the mid-80s, Altman also did some distinguished television work, most notably the satirical mini-series Tanner '88, scripted by cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Shot in documentary style, it charted the adventures of a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. Certainly one of Altman's most complete achievements, it left its stylistic mark on such TV series as Hill Street Blues and ER.
Altman was much praised for Vincent and Theo (1990), an uncharacteristically stiff film which pictured van Gogh as "a poor schmuck who had a lousy life," as the director put it. But the film that put him back in the spotlight was the Hollywood satire The Player (1992). As with MASH, Altman made a success of a script that several directors had rejected: crammed with Hollywood in-jokes and celebrity cameos, The Player was rapturously received by the Hollywood community, its vanity tickled even by scabrous mockery. He followed it with the far more ambitious Short Cuts, a weaving of Raymond Carver's short stories into a sprawling canvas of the petty comedies and tragedies of the Los Angeles lifestyle. Here Altman outraged Carver cultists by uprooting the original stories from the author's Pacific North-West, by adding a new story of his own, and using Annie Ross's sardonic lounge songs as a linking chorus. Less amorphous than Nashville, Short Cuts' mass of narratives nevertheless demanded more concerted involvement from the audience than any other American film of the 90s; and its blithely apocalyptic pay-off and decidedly cruel streak served to make Altman as controversial as he had been at his peak in the 70s.
It seemed only inevitable that Altman would again fall from grace, as happened with the ill-received but spirited Pret-à-Porter, a Nashville-style lampoon on the fashion industry. Significantly, it was when he made a rare venture on to personal terrain that Altman came really unstuck. Kansas City (1996) revisited the place and time of his boyhood, and his early memories of jazz; but the result was claustrophobic and strangely non-committal. True to form he bounced back yet again with the Oscar-winning Gosford Park (2001), which moved him out of his natural habitat and embroiled him in the murderous skullduggery of a British stately pile. His movie swansong was this year's A Prairie Home Companion, an adaptation of the work of Garrison Keillor.
It's tempting to think that the definitive Altman films might have been those many projects throughout his career that never came to fruition - E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, from which he was fired by producer Dino de Laurentiis, outraged by Buffalo Bill; a long-cherished adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Cham pions; a biopic of Rossini; revisits to Nashville and Short Cuts; and an ambitious plan to make two films from the Aids drama Angels in America. The films he did make were often flawed, sometimes wildly so, but rarely compromised by settling for mere industry standards.
Certainly, Altman's wavering fortunes have conferred on his career a sort of quixotic nobility. He certainly contributed to his own problems, not only by his individualism and candour, but also by the gambling streak he shared with his father, and which was not exclusively extra-curricular. He was also a seasoned drinker - "I don't drink while I'm working," he claimed, "but I work a lot while I'm drinking" - and womaniser, although his marriage to his third wife Kathryn Reed, his partner since 1958, is one of the film world's more enduring matches.
Despite admitting to the Guardian that "everything I've learned has come from watching other directors", Altman was reluctant to identify his influences - and, equally, it is hard to see which filmmakers he has left his stylistic mark on. It would be hard for anyone to "do" Altman, since his style seems to be as much about attitude as about what is visible on screen. The seemingly ragged approach he developed in the 70s, the moves towards democracy among actors and crew - but certainly not writers, whose efforts he tended to downplay - made for a circus-like, medicine-show feel, which justifies the comparisons with Fellini. His finest films, while they clearly address the world outside them, nevertheless created their own entirely distinctive atmosphere. Acclaimed for his critique of American culture, Altman always denied having any particular agenda: "I research these subjects," he said, "and discover so much bullshit that it just comes out that way."
It has been said of Altman that he was "ennobled by failure and oppressed by success", which would explain his unpredictable moves and idiosyncratic reading of his own career - for he continued to defend Pret-á-Porter while dismissing The Player as "a fake film." Pauline Kael has said: "Altman's art, like Fred Astaire's, is the great American art of making the impossible look easy." More than that, he made the alarming vagaries of his own career look like a rollercoaster joyride.
· Robert Altman; born February 20 1925, died November 21 2006.