Altman served as a U.S. Army pilot from 1943 to 1947, studied at the University of Missouri for three years, and subsequently directed industrial films. During the late 1950s and the '60s he directed for such television series as Bus Stop and Combat. Altman's first two feature films, Countdown (1967) and That Cold Day in the Park (1969), met with production difficulties and box-office failure. With M*A*S*H, however, Altman won accolades and box-office success. The directorial innovations that distinguished the film, most notably the disregard for conventional plot and the use of overlapping strains of dialogue and other sound, subsequently became Altman stocks-in-trade. Brewster McCloud (also 1969) was an eccentric fantasy on human flight, set in the Houston Astrodome. The critically acclaimed McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) was called an antiwestern for its irreverent portrait of life in a frontier boomtown.

Altman's next success was The Long Goodbye (1973), an updated rendering of a Raymond Chandler detective novel. He stirred both critical and popular debate with the 1976 film Nashville, a sprawling, kaleidoscopic view of a political campaign set against the backdrop of the country-music industry. Some critics praised the film as a vivid allegory of American life, while others found it overambitious and muddled.

Altman maintained a prodigious directorial output, though many of his films released in the decade after Nashville were critical or financial failures. Among the more interesting of them are Three Women (1977), A Wedding (1978), and several film adaptations of contemporary plays, notably Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982).

More successful was The Player (1992), a black comedy about a motion-picture studio executive who murders a writer. He followed up the success of this scathing satire of Hollywood with Short Cuts (1993), a pessimistic look at contemporary American society that earned him an Oscar nomination for his directing. After skewering the modern fashion industry in Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Altman explored the 1930s in Kansas City (1996) and Gosford Park (2001). The latter, a murder mystery set in an English manor, garnered seven Oscar nominations. Other later works of note include Cookie's Fortune (1999), The Company (2003), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006). In 2006 Altman received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement.