Playwright and actor Sam Shepard dead at 73
His performance as pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s “The Right Stuff ” brought an Oscar nomination.
Sam Shepard, who has died at age 73 of complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease, was the bard of America’s flat highways, wide-open spaces and wounding, dysfunctional families. His death was especially mourned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, whose initial rapid rise to global fame as an intense, in-yourface theater was intrinsically linked to Shepard and his work.
“Shepard,” said Anna D. Shapiro, the Steppenwolf artistic director, “was the embodiment of all that the founders of Steppenwolf wanted to achieve.”
Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky, according to an announcement Monday from his family.
Born in Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1943, the once-prolific playwright (and actor, essayist and poet) was the author of such seminal dramatic works as “The Tooth of Crime” (1973); the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” (1978), set in downstate Illinois, “Curse of the Starving Class” (1978); and “True West” (1980). His masterful “A Lie of the Mind” (1985) is a three-act, four-hour, metaphor-laden odyssey through the dismal failures of American parenting.
If his peer, David Mamet, penned the poetry of American urbanity, Shepard wrote oft-surreal odes to farmers, rock stars and the sexually repressed residents of trailer parks. Although a native Midwesterner (he was born into a family that started out as wheat farmers in McHenry County and later moved to a Chicago suburb), Shepard got out of Dodge and soon became fascinated with the people and open spaces of the Southwest.
But his work returned home often to the Midwest, a region he could not escape.
Wherever his subjects wandered, Shepard was widely regarded as the greatest playwright of his generation and was the subject of countless books and academic studies and, over the course of several decades, just as many adoring accountings of his cowboy gestalt.
A famously intense and taciturn actor, Shepard broke out as a Hollywood actor in Terrence Malick’s “Days Of Heaven” (1978), playing opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. He was nominated for an Academy Award for “The Right Stuff ” (1983). And many fans adore his work in Wim Wenders’ acclaimed “Paris, Texas” (1984), for which Shepard co-wrote the screenplay. His Hollywood portfolio was diverse, encompassing “Crimes of the Heart,” “Steel Magnolias” and “Black Hawk Down.”
Shepard played the Weston patriarch in the 2013 movie version of Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” originally a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that owed much to his structural and thematic influence, an influence that extends to Ireland and the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.
Shepard was romantically involved with actress Jessica Lange from 1982 to 2009, although the pair never married. They had two children: Hannah Jane Shepard, 31, and Samuel Walker Shepard, 30.
Shepard was an alternative downtown scribe before it was fashionable in New York and a lifelong student of the contradictions inherent in the American soul. He might have eschewed didacticism in favor of symbol, but his plays and prose generally were critical of the gatekeepers of Hollywood, portraying such chatty men in suits as superficial, perfidious and two-faced pretenders, unable to understand the cool of real Americans who understood the pull of the outdoors and the raw pleasure of a drive down Interstate 40.