Playwright and actor Sam Shepard dies at 73

SAM Shepard, the Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and celebrated author whose plays chronicled the explosive fault lines of family and masculinity in the American West, has died aged 73.

Shepard died on Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, family spokesman Chris Boneau said yesterday.

The taciturn Shepard, who grew up on a California ranch, was a man of few words who nevertheless produced 44 plays and numerous books, memoirs and short stories.

He was one of the most influential playwrights of his generation: a plain-spoken poet of the modern frontier who combined ruggedness with lyricism.

In his 1971 one-act Cowboy Mouth, which he wrote with his then girlfriend, musician and poet Patti Smith, one character says: “People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth” - a role the tall and handsome Shepard fulfilled for many.

“I was writing basically for actors,” Shepard told the Associated Press in a 2011 interview.

“And actors immediately seemed to have a handle on it, on the rhythm of it, the sound of it, the characters. I started to understand there was this possibility of conversation between actors and that’s how it all started.”

Shepard’s Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant film star, too.

He appeared in dozens of films many of them Westerns - including Terrence Malick’s Days Of Heaven, Steel Magnolias, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and 2012’s Mud.

He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as astronaut Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff.