Sam Shepard
Actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who explored the dark side of the American dream
SAM SHEPARD, who has died aged 73, overcame a difficult childhood and poor education to become one of America’s leading literary figures – a Pulitzer prizewinning playwright, an Oscarnominated actor, an author, director, poet, musician, and long-time partner of the actress Jessica Lange.
A rangy 6ft tall, with weatherbeaten good looks and a laconic western drawl, Shepard enjoyed considerable success as an actor, appearing in some 50 films, beginning with a leading role as a farmer in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978).
He went on to star opposite Jessica Lange in Frances (1982) and was the cowboyish test pilot Chuck Yeager in Phil Kauffman’s The Right Stuff (1983), an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book, the role which won him comparisons with Gary Cooper and a nomination for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
He was Diane Keaton’s love interest in Baby Boom (1987), played the husband of Dolly Parton’s character in Steel Magnolias (1989) and appeared in Black Hawk Down (2001), about the 1993 raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. More recently he played the patriarch in the film of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning drama August: Osage County (2013) and from 2015 to earlier this year he appeared in the Netflix thriller Bloodline.
Shepard’s screenwriting credits included the prize-winning Zabriskie Point (1969) for Michelangelo Antonioni, Me and My Brother (1969) for Robert Frank, and Paris, Texas (1984) for Wim Wenders, a film which won the Palme d’or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. He made less fruitful forays into directing, with the littleseen Far North (1988), which he also wrote and which starred Jessica Lange, and Silent Tongue (1993).
But it was his powerful, disturbing plays examining the dark side of the American dream about which academic treatises were written. Often centred on the lives of suffocating, incestuous families and wretched lovers from the fly-blown outer reaches of the American outback, they depicted people struggling to make sense of their lives but caught between the romanticised past of sturdy, God-fearing frontiersmen and a future dominated by commerce, technology and mass communication.
His writing career took off in 1964 with the production of two one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden. In 1966 he took home Obie (Offbroadway Theater) awards for three plays: Chicago, Red Cross and Icarus’ Mother, and won another Obie the following year with his first full-length work, La Turista. He would go on to receive 10 more Obie Awards.
He won his Pulitzer in 1979 for Buried Child, the darkly comic tale of a city boy who returns to his Illinois family farmstead with his uncomprehending girlfriend only to be greeted with devastating indifference by his relations.
The play, which drew on Shepard’s own background, marked a turning point in his career. It heralded such works as True West (1980), in which two very different brothers, one a Hollywood screenwriter, the other a desert drifter, fight about their father’s decline into alcoholism, knowing that it is possibly their own destiny, and Fool for Love (1983), featuring a torrid affair in a cheap hotel in the Mojave desert between two protagonists who turn out to be half siblings. In 1985 it was made into a film by Robert Altman, starring Kim Basinger and Shepard himself, menacing as the cowboy stuntman protagonist.
A Lie of the Mind (1985) was a tale of family dysfunction, concerning a battered woman, brain-damaged after an attack by her husband but psychologically dependent on him.
Shepard’s plays became a staple of the repertoires of leading American theatres and were often staged in London, where he had lived for a few years in the 1970s.
Not everybody was a fan, however. Writing of a 2006 production at the Almeida Theatre of Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss, a nightmarish tale in which two brothers argue about their father’s suspicious death, while the horrified, booze-sodden father wakes up on a slab, not believing he really is dead, the Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer defined Sam Shepard territory as a place where “malign parents screw up their offspring, siblings feud (and sometimes fornicate), and dark secrets lurk around every twist in the plot”.
“You know just where you are,” Spencer went on, “when someone takes a deep pull on a bottle of bourbon, the coyotes start howling and the simmering threat of confrontation finally turns into a brutal brawl.”
The playwright, he concluded, “has delighted us long enough”.
One of three children, Samuel Shepard Rogers was born on November 5 1943 at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. His father had won a Fulbright scholarship and was a fluent speaker of Spanish, but he struggled with the return to civilian life after serving as a bomber pilot in the Second World War and took to drink.
Eventually, after losing several jobs, he moved the family to Duarte, California, where he attempted to farm avocados and took out his frustrations on his only son.
“He used to systematically selfdestruct,” Shepard recalled. “Very violent, very crazy … I left home under a great deal of duress at the age of 18.” The quality of simmering, barely controlled (sometimes uncontrolled) violence that disrupted and distorted Shepard’s childhood would inspire much of his best work.
In 1963, after dropping out of college, where he was studying agriculture, Shepard moved to New York. There, working as a waiter at a Greenwich Village nightclub, he met Ralph Cook, who introduced him to the theatre.
It was Cook’s Theater Genesis that staged Shepard’s first play, Cowboys. Shepard continued to work as a waiter while writing in his off-duty hours and moonlighting as a drummer for a psychedelic blues band called the Holy Modal Rounders.
In 1969 he married the actress O-lan Jones. Their son, Jesse, was born shortly afterwards, but at around the same time he began a passionate affair with the rock poet Patti Smith, spending much of his time in her room at the Chelsea Hotel.
Before long, however, he had decided to return to his wife and baby, though not before he and Patti had explored their fraught relationship in Cowboy Mouth, a play set in the squalor of her room, which premiered in 1971 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, then opened at the American Place Theatre with Shepard and Patti Smith playing themselves.
The production was directed by Robert Glaudini (who was involved with O-lan Jones) and produced in a double bill with Shepard’s Black Bog Beast Bait, starring O-lan and directed by her old flame Tony Barsha.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it all proved too much and in late 1971 Shepard fled with O-lan and Jesse to London, where he remained until 1974. It was here that his writing really matured. In 1972 he was asked to direct Bob Hoskins, Stephen Rea and Kenneth Cranham in his play, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, at the Royal Court, and he recalled that the experience had changed the way he approached writing, “because I started writing for the actors”.
Returning to America, in 1975 he toured with Bob Dylan, later collaborating with him on his 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, and recording his memories in The Rolling Thunder Logbook (2010). Shepard wrote nearly 50 plays over the course of his career. He also published volumes of poetry, short stories and monologues.
He did not often give interviews but when he did he was usually described as “taciturn” and “private”. Like his father, he struggled for many years with alcoholism and was twice arrested for drink driving, most recently in 2015.
His marriage to O-lan Jones was dissolved in 1984 after nearly 15 years, after he moved in with Jessica Lange, whom he had met on the set of Frances and with whom he would also appear in Country (1984) and Crimes of the Heart (1986). They never married, but their relationship lasted nearly 30 years before they separated.
He is survived by their son and daughter and by his son by his marriage to O-lan Jones.
Sam Shepard, born November 5 1943, died July 27 2017