Scriptwriter, producer and director of American cinema, known by the idiosyncratic character, iconoclasta and innovator of its films.

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and studied cinema in the Calvin Company. At the end of the decade of 1950 he directed telefilmes and documentary advertising before achieveing the success with M.A.S.H. (1970). It already emphasized then by its little orthodox methods of production (the equipment and artistic they lived in the own scenery --a military camp--), its style of dangerous accomplishment (superposed and improvised dialogues, semidocumentary camera and assembly), as well as by its irreverencia towards the tradition and the classic sorts of the cinema of Hollywood.

After M.A.S.H., it directed a series of films that had good welcome, among them the vividores (1971), Images (1972), long good bye (1973), Thieves like U.S. (1974), California Split (1974) and the Nashville musical comedy (1975). Nevertheless, their films went away more and more making eccentric and inaccessible for the public, and even for the cinematographic industry and the critic, like Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1975), a day of wedding (1978) or Quinteto (1979).

After Popeye (1980), profitable but as soon as valued, it closed his center of production in Hollywood. In the decade of 1980, after directing to plays off Broadway, (one sees Theaters of Broadway) it was dedicated to roll theater productions for the television by cable. The most outstanding projects of these years are: To eats back the five and tell me (1982), Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Laundromat (1983), Remainders (1983) and Secret Honor (1984). In 1990 it directed to Vincent and Theo.

The interest of Altman by the use of alternative formats reaches its Maxima expression in Tanner'88, a épico project after television by cable that presents/displays to a fictitious candidate in the presidential ones of 1988. It is written and it rolled simultaneously to real the electoral campaign, and incorporates authentic personages like the senator Robert Dole, or Kitty Dukakis, wife of the democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, mixed with professional actors. More recent it is Kansas City (1996), a story that mix the worlds of the game, prostitution, the Mafia, the policy and the jazz in the city that gives name to the film. In 1998 it released the film Conflict of interests, carried out by the actor and British director Kenneth Branagh, cradle in a history of the judicial novel writer John Grisham, and in 2000 doctor T and the women, a comedy in which Richard Gere in the heat of interprets to a gynecologist maturity crisis. In Gosford Park (2001), Altman reunites some of the interpreters most shining of the British scene, like Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi or Maggie Smith.

Altman has been name four times for the Oscar to the best director, by M.A.S.H., Nashville, the game of Hollywood and crossed Vidas. Laundromat and Tanner'88 obtained the prize Emmy of 1983 and 1988, respectively.