KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Robert Altman, who died Monday night in Los Angeles at the age of 81, spent much of his life on the outs with the Hollywood establishment.

“They make gloves, and I sell shoes,” he once explained.

Nevertheless, in a career that spanned more than 50 years, the Kansas City-born filmmaker went from low-budget productions and industrial films to TV series and finally on to feature films like “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “The Player,” “Short Cuts” and this year’s “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Through flush times and lean times he stubbornly steered his own path, working only on the projects that interested him and often battling a studio culture that found his work too unpredictable, too individualistic and too sardonic for mainstream tastes.

Altman was often described as an iconoclast and a maverick. Nevertheless, he received five Oscar nominations for his direction and earlier this year received an honorary Academy Award for his work.

His was a career of highs and lows.

“I don’t know how to account for the fact that when he’s good, he’s superb, and when he isn’t good, he’s nothing,” wrote New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.

Altman’s flops far outnumbered his hits (in fact he had only one bona fide smash, 1970’s “M*A*S*H”), but he always bounced back. When the big studios wouldn’t have anything to do with him, he launched a series of low-budget films like “Fool for Love,” “Secret Honor” and “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.”

He also did daring work for television, directing short plays by Harold Pinter, a new version of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” and the HBO series “Tanner “88,” which followed a presidential candidate on the campaign trail (with real politicians playing themselves).

He also directed for the theater and opera house.

Altman married three times. He and his third wife, Kathryn, had two sons, and he had a daughter and two other sons from previous marriages.

He was born in 1925, and his father was a prosperous Kansas City insurance broker. He went to Rockhurst High School, but his contempt for authority (a character trait that would follow him throughout his life) landed him at Kemper Military School.

He was a crewman on a bomber in the Pacific in the waning days of World War II. Returning home, he took a job with Calvin Communications here, writing and directing short training and industrial films like “How to Run a Filling Station” and “Better Football.”

It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was a great way to learn everything about cinema. And even back then Altman had something of a reputation as a wild man who did things his way.

“Bob and Forrest Calvin, the owner of the company, used to go round and round,” recalled Larry Kauffman, who acted in a few of Altman’s Calvin productions and later went on to write, direct and produce for the firm. “Cal got so frustrated because Bob did whatever he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.

“But at the same time Bob was excellent. Extremely talented and creative. He never overshot. Other directors might get six, seven, eight takes of a scene. Bob usually got it on the first take and then moved on.”

By the time he relocated to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, Altman already had directed two features in Kansas City – the documentary “The James Dean Story” and the teen exploitation picture “The Delinquents” starring Tom Laughlin, the future “Billy Jack.”

He worked quickly and cheaply on TV series as varied as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Peter Gunn,” “Whirlybirds,” “The Millionaire,” “Maverick,” “Bonanza” and “Combat,” honing his craft and often trying to sneak subversive moments past the producers and network brass. Finally, at age 45, he landed a feature film assignment.

His first two Hollywood movies, “Countdown” and “That Cold Day in the Park,” made little impact but his third, “M*A*S*H,” an anti-military satire set in a field hospital during the Korean War, was huge. The film earned an Oscar nomination for best picture, but more important, it captured the funny, loose, pleasantly jaded feel that would become the hallmark of Robert Altman pictures.

For young people who grew up with sex, drugs and Vietnam protests, the appearance throughout the “70s of a new Altman film was cause for celebration.

Whether he was pitting individual initiative against corporate capitalism on the American frontier (“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”), identifying with Depression-era bank robbers (“Thieves Like Us”) or gambling addicts (“California Split”), or retelling the myth of Icarus in the Houston Astrodome (“Brewster McCloud”), Altman’s films could be counted on to offer a gentle appreciation of life’s losers, a gleeful dismantling of authority figures and a distinctive visual and aural style that opened new cinematic possibilities.

Altman used overlapping dialogue to create soundscapes in which individual lines often were less important than the atmosphere they created. His restless camera and zoom lenses were almost never still (there is not one stationary shot in all of “The Long Goodbye,” his deconstruction of the hard-boiled detective film).

Altman rarely told conventional stories. Ensemble films like “A Wedding,” “HealtH,” “Nashville,” “Short Cuts,” “Gosford Park” and “A Prairie Home Companion” lack central characters and are structured just tightly enough to make sense. Many had the unrehearsed feel of life caught on the fly.

Along the way Altman built a repertory company of actors, designers and writers who fell in love with his method. Performers like Paul Newman, Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall and Elliott Gould have worked with Altman again and again (as did key members of his crew).

The reason for their loyalty, Altman once explained, is that he gave actors credit for being creative, artistic individuals. He hired them not for what he knew they could do, but for the surprises he hoped they would deliver.

“He’s like the host of a good party,” longtime Altman actor Michael Murphy has said. “That’s why you never see a bad performance – because everybody’s relaxed.”

In fact, Altman’s sets gained notoriety for their party atmosphere. Typically everyone involved in an Altman production was invited to watch the “dailies,” the developed footage from the previous day’s shooting, and offer their comments. For years alcohol and marijuana were part of the ritual.

In 1995 Altman returned to his hometown to shoot “Kansas City,” a tale of crime, jazz and politics in the 1930s that featured some of the best contemporary young musicians re-creating the KC swing sound.

On a visit to a doctor here, Altman was told his heart was deteriorating and he was urged to sign up for a heart donor list.

Joe Mandacina, a Kansas City based cinematographer who operated a camera on “Kansas City,” recalled that Altman spent lots of time in his trailer between shots. “We all kind of knew he wasn’t doing well.”

Later that year Altman received the heart of a young woman but waited a decade – until he received his honorary Oscar this year – to announce that he’d had a heart transplant.

Mandacina said one of the high points of his career was a compliment from Altman.

“One night we were watching dailies, and Bob came up to me and my crew and said some of the moving camera stuff we’d shot in the Hey Hey Club” – a recreation of a Swing Era nightclub – “was among the best footage he’d ever seen. To hear it coming from a guy like that … it really meant a lot.”

In recent years Altman’s career resurged. His British drawing-room mystery “Gosford Park” was an international success and picked up seven Academy Award nominations, and “A Prairie Home Companion,” released this summer, was a modest box office hit and earned glowing reviews.

But through it all Altman remained true to his own vision. He did what he wanted when he wanted to do it.