Award-winning author, actor Sam Shepard dies at age 73
NEW YORK—Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and celebrated author whose plays chronicled the explosive fault lines of family and masculinity in the American West, has died. He was 73.
Family spokesman Chris Boneau said Monday that Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
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, both lyrical and rugged.
Shepard’s Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant movie 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 pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s “The Right Stuff.” Among his most recent roles was the Florida Keys patriarch of the Netflix series “Bloodline.”
But Shepard was best remembered for his influential plays and his prominent role in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. His 1979 play “Buried Child,” about the breaking down of an Illinois family, won the Pulitzer for drama. Two other plays— “True West,” about two warring brothers, and “Fool for Love,” about a man who fears he’s turning into his father—were nominated for the Pulitzers as well. All are frequently revived.
“I always felt like playwriting was the thread through all of it,” Shepard said in 2011.
Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943. He grew up on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California. His father was an alcoholic schoolteacher and former Army pilot. Shepard would later write frequently of the damage done by drunks. He had his own struggles, too. Long stretches of sobriety were interrupted by drunken driving arrests, in 2009 and 2015.
Shepard arrived in New York in 1963 with no connections, little money and vague aspirations to act, write or make music.
His early plays—fiery, surreal verbal assaults—pushed American theater in an energized, frenzied direction that matched the times. A drummer himself, Shepard found his own rock ‘n’ roll rhythm. Seeking spontaneity, he initially refused to rewrite his drafts, a strategy he later dismissed as “just plain stupid.”
As Shepard matured as a playwright, he returned again and again to meditations on violence, masculinity and family. His collection “Seven Plays,” which includes many of his best plays, including “Buried Child” and “The Tooth of Crime,” was dedicated to his father.
“There’s some hidden, deeply rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that invariably is violent,” he told The New York Times in 1984.
Shepard was married from 1969 to 1984 to actress O-Lan Jones, with whom he had son Jesse Mojo Shepard.
His connection to music was constant. He joined Bob Dylan on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975, and co-wrote the song “Brownsville Girl” with him. Shepard and Patti Smith were one-time lovers but lifetime friends. “We’re just the same,” Smith once said. “When Sam and I are together, it’s like no particular time.”