Kathryn Reed Altman preserved legacy of husband, assisted behind the scenes

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Kathryn Reed Altman, who helped safeguard and enhance the artistic legacy of her husband, the film director Robert Altman, died March 9 at her home in Santa Monica, California. She was 91.

The cause was a heart attack, a spokesman for the Altman family, Mike Kaplan, said in a statement.

Altman was a former showgirl and movie extra who met her husband in 1959, long before he became successful and famous as the innovative director of “M*A*S*H,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” “California Split,” “Nashville,” “A Wedding,” “The Player,” “Short Cuts” and many other movies. They met on the set of a television show, “Whirlybirds,” a drama about helicopter pilots; he was directing an episode, and she was cast as a nurse. They married within weeks, and as she put it, “I never worked again after ‘Whirlybirds.’”

Instead, Altman became her husband’s indispensable amanuensis, uncredited on the screen but indelibly helpful on the set, where she was a smoother of feathers, a personal connector among the various layers of personnel and a social director at gatherings that followed the viewing of dailies. She was also a keeper of the Altman history, documenting his career and their life together in papers, photographs, film snippets and scrapbooks, a personal archive that is at the heart of the Robert Altman Collection at the University of Michigan.

Since her husband’s death in 2006, Altman has appeared as a speaker and panelist at retrospectives of his work, including events at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the University of California, Los Angeles. With the film critic, scholar and festival organizer Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, she wrote and edited a book about her husband, “Altman” (2014), part biography and part appreciation, that includes hundreds of photographs and text by Martin Scorsese, E.L. Doctorow and Tess Gallagher.

Altman was a consultant on “Altman,” a 2014 documentary directed by Ron Mann in which she was also one of the narrators, sharing tidbits about her long love affair with one of America’s great filmmakers.

“He looked a little hung over,” Altman said about their first meeting on the “Whirlybirds” set. “When we were introduced, he didn’t say hello. He just said, ‘How are your morals?’ And I said: ‘A little shaky. How are yours?’ That was the beginning.”

Kathryn Audrey Reed was born in Glendale, California, on June 2, 1924, to Richard Reed, who operated a gas station, and the former Lois Cummings, a bookkeeper. She graduated from Hollywood High School and joined “Earl Carroll’s Vanities,” a musical revue featuring showgirls in skimpy costumes. After responding to a casting call for, as she put it, “girls who could swim,” she began working as an extra in the movies and on television.

Her first marriage, to the jazz trombonist Tommy Pederson, ended in divorce. She is survived by their daughter, Konni Corriere; two sons, Robert and Matthew, from her marriage to Robert Altman; a stepdaughter, Christine Altman; two stepsons, Stephen and Michael; 12 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.