The reasons for that probably lie in the mercurial nature of his charm &ndash prodigiously effective when

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The reasons for that probably lie in the mercurial nature of his charm – prodigiously effective when brought into play with with actors and crew, virtually non-existent when it comes to movie executives and head-office apparatchiks.Altman has always been a gambler, artistically and financially – and he almost never hedges his bets. The result is one of the most distinctive careers in Hollywood and a filmography in which major losses jostle against big wins. Altman is stubbornly resistant to discriminating between his films, but the metaphor he chooses to fend off questions about his favourites suggest that even he recognises the inconsistency of his canon: "They're like children, you know, and you tend to love your least successful children the most."Altman himself was born in Kansas City in 1925, into a relatively prosperous household and a solid middle-class society (the intimacy and security of which, he has said, find an echo in his film Cookie's Fortune). His father was an insurance salesman, who rounded off his professional relationship with risk through regular late-night poker games – a passion that he passed on to his son. In his childhood, though, Altman gambled principally with the patience of his parents – ultimately proving wild enough in his behaviour to be dispatched to a military academy, a traditional American solution for well-to-do delinquency. Towards the end of the war he trained as a bomber pilot in the Dutch East Indies, and it's clear that both forms of education fed into M*A*S*H – the timely insubordination of which gave him his first commercial hit.It remains one of the great missed matchmaking opportunities that his Hollywood stock at the time was not high enough to get him a shot at the film of Catch-22, a script for which his style and history made him almost perfectly qualified (he was actually working on a comic script about First World War aviators at the time).

Instead, while Mike Nichols was filming Heller's novel with a lavish budget, Altman was spending a fraction of the money on a film that he consciously identified as an underdog competitor.After Catch-22 bombed and M*A*S*H took off, Altman had a banner made for his office that boasted "Caught 22". Nichols knew it, too – watching a private screening of M*A*S*H before either film was released, he recalls his heart sinking as he realised that Altman's loose, reckless style had delivered what millions of dollars could not – the unfakeable tang of genuine anti-authoritarianism.M*A*S*H was the first major studio movie to include the word "fuck" and the first openly to mock a belief in God. What's more, Altman had spiked it with his own insurrectionary spirit: the puritanical tannoy announcement in the film about pin-ups in camp was taken directly from a pompous memo sent during production to his office by Fox bureaucrats.The route to that first peak of his Hollywood career had not been particularly direct. After demobilisation he had gone to Los Angeles hoping to break into the movies. But although he found some work as an extra, it wasn't enough to survive on, and he eventually returned to Kansas City, where he joined a company making industrial training films. This celluloid production line – working very fast, on tiny budgets and with minimal supervision – proved to be the perfect apprenticeship for his first feature – a teen exploitation pic which he wrote in five days and made in just 22 on a budget of $63,000.On the basis of that film, in 1957 Alfred Hitchcock offered him the opportunity to direct for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, a job that led on to more television work – though not without a characteristic Altman hiccup, after he'd rubbished a prospective script to his boss without realising that it was one that she had developed herself.

He wasn't out of work for long because he was never shy about pressing his virtues on prospective employers: "I would bring my industrial films with me," he told one interviewer. "I carried projectors to parties and set up and generally imposed myself on people."He was soon working steadily – on series such as Bonanza (which he prodded towards more comic episodes) and US Marshal. This was hackwork, but it was hackwork that allowed considerable leeway for a director with an audacious streak: "I was working with such dreadful scripts that I just found it was better to change them, or let the actors change them," he recalled later, identifying this period as the origin for his trademark improvisational style.He refined it further in M*A*S*H – hiring a large number of actors from a San Francisco improvisational theatre to fill out the meagre cast-list the studio had originally approved. Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, unnerved by the crowded sets and mildly chaotic shooting style, appealed for Altman to be sacked from the production – but in the end his instincts were vindicated by the unprecedented naturalism of the film.

While executives believed the film was virtually unreleasable, citing the confusing sound and the bloodiness of the operating room sequences, audiences proved more than equal to the challenge Altman had thrown down.Altman's ambitions had first centred around story – but he quickly developed a far less conventional notion of what a film might be. He can still blindside executives weaned on "narrative arc" and "three-act structure" with the numinous vagueness of his approach. He talks of his films as being "spherical" not linear and insists that cinema's traditional emulation of literary forms is a mistake. Film isn't like literature, he has said, "it's more like painting. They should be more like murals".Nashville turned out to be exactly that – a sprawling, densely populated wall-painting that depicted the mecca of country music and, incidentally, the state of the nation. And, more than any of his contemporaries, Altman has collaborated with chance in the making of his films.