A Prairie Home Companion is a 2006 ensemble comedy elegy directed by Robert Altman, his final film released just five months before his death. It is based on A Prairie Home Companion, a program broadcast on public radio stations in the United States and elsewhere. The film is a fictional representation of behind-the-scenes activities on a long-running radio show of the same name.

Cast

• Garrison Keillor (the show's creator) as himself
• Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, who hail from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the last two of what was once a popular family country music act
• Lindsay Lohan as Lola Johnson, Yolanda's daughter who writes poems about suicide
• Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as Keillor's radio characters Dusty and Lefty, the singing cowboys.
• Tommy Lee Jones as the Axeman, a businessman from Texas who has come to shut down the show
• Kevin Kline as Keillor's radio character Guy Noir, a film noir P.I. repurposed as the program's security director
• Virginia Madsen as the Dangerous Woman, "Asphodel," who may or may not be the Angel of Death (Asphodel is a flower, referenced in the poem "Demeter And Persephone" by Alfred Lord Tennyson and associated with death and Hades in Greek mythology)
• Tim Russell and Maya Rudolph as the stage manager and his assistant
• Robin & Linda Williams as Themselves
• Tom Keith, as the Sound-Effects Guy
• Sue Scott, as the Make-Up Artist

Five of the stars (Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, John C. Reilly, Virginia Madsen) as well as all the other members of the cast of the film (except Sue Scott, Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan) are midwesterners. Three (Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson and L. Q. Jones) are from Texas, the state given rough treatment by the WLT cast and crew.