Robert Altman is best known for his irreverent views of America in the 1970s. A pilot in World War II, Altman returned to his native Kansas City, Missouri, to make industrial films.

After working on the television series Whirlybirds and Bonanza, he scored his first big movie success with M*A*S*H in 1970, a savage antiwar comedy about army medics in Korea. For the next five years he averaged two films a year, presenting an unbroken string of commercially successful and critically praised hits. He satirized the western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971), the psychological drama (Images, 1972), the gangster thriller (The Long Goodbye, 1973) and the caper film (California Split, 1974). Films far more difficult to categorize during this time included an allegory about a flying boy (Brewster McCloud, 1970), Altman's personal favorite; a poignant story about a trio of young robbers (Thieves Like Us, 1974); and the masterful, densely textured Nashville (1975). Subsequently he has directed a number of stage plays and a string of quirky, occasionally bewildering films, including the science fiction allegory Quintet (1979) and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean (1982).

Altman received critical acclaim for The Player (1992), a film that portrayed the more scandalous elements of the Hollywood industry, and Gosford Park (2001), an Academy Award-winning dark comedy that narrates familial intrigue in 1930s Britain. Altman has said he is preoccupied in his pictures with the "flexible boundary between sanity and insanity."