Pulitzer-winning playwright Sam Shepard dies at 73
NEWYORK— Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and celebrated author whose plays chronicled the explosive fault lines of family in the American West, has died. He was 73.
Family spokesman Chris Boneau said Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The taciturn Shepard produced 44 plays and numerous books, memoirs and short stories.
Shepard’s Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant movie star . He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Chuck Yeager in 1983’s “The
Right Stuff.”
But Shepard was best remembered for his influential plays. His 1979 play “Buried Child” won the Pulitzer for drama. Two other plays — “True West” and “Fool for Love” — were nominated for Pulitzers.
“I always felt like playwriting was the thread through all of it,” Shepard said in 2011. “Theater really when you think about it contains everything. It can contain film. Film can’t contain theater. Music. Dance. Painting. Acting. It’s the whole deal.”
Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943. He grew up on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California.
Shepard was married from 1969 to 1984 to actress O-lan Jones, with whom he had son Jesse Mojo Shepard.
While making the biopic “Frances,” he met Jessica Lange. They had two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. They separated in 2009.
t the walls,” Shepard writes. “The appendages don’t seem connected to the motor — whatever that is — driving this thing. They won’t take direction — won’t be dictated to — the arms, legs, feet, hands. Nothing moves. Nothing even wants to.”
Shepard is survived by his three children and two sisters: Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.