Alan Rudolph (born 18 December 1943 in Los Angeles) is an American film director and screenwriter.
Rudolph is the son of Oscar Rudolph (1911–1991), a television director and actor. He is a protégé of Robert Altman, and worked as an assistant director on Altman's film of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.
Rudolph's own films tend to focus on isolated or eccentric characters and their relationships, and are frequently ensemble pieces including prominent elements of romanticism and fantasy. He has written almost all the films he has directed, and he has worked repeatedly with actors Keith Carradine and Geneviève Bujold, and composer Mark Isham (see List of noted film director and composer collaborations).
Rudolph first came to prominence with Choose Me (1984), the story of the sexual relationships between a handful of lonely but charming characters, including an ex-prostitute bar owner (Lesley Ann Warren), an emotionally repressed radio talk show host (Bujold) and a disarmingly honest madman (Carradine). Trouble in Mind (1985) featured Kris Kristofferson as well as Bujold, Carradine and John Waters icon Divine. The Moderns (1988) was a love story, set in 1920s Paris, about an expatriate American artist (Carradine) re-igniting his love for his wife (Linda Fiorentino), despite her marriage with a sinister, philistine art collector played by John Lone.
After the relatively conventional thriller Mortal Thoughts (1991) starring Demi Moore, Equinox (1992) starred Matthew Modine as a pair of separated twins, and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) was a loving recreation of the Algonquin Round Table and a sympathetic biopic of Dorothy Parker, with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role. Breakfast of Champions (1999) was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's metafictional novel, with Albert Finney as the wildly prolific but terminally underappreciated science fiction writer Kilgore Trout.
