Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard (born November 5, 1943, Fort Sheridan, near Highland Park, Illinois, U.S.—died July 27, 2017, Midway, Kentucky) American playwright and actor whose plays adroitly blend images of the American West, Pop motifs, science fiction, and other elements of popular and youth culture.

As the son of a career army father, Shepard spent his childhood on military bases across the United States and in Guam before his family settled on a farm in Duarte, California. After a year of agricultural studies in college, he joined a touring company of actors and, in 1963, moved to New York City to pursue his theatrical interests. His earliest attempts at playwriting, a rapid succession of one-act plays, found a receptive audience in Off-Off-Broadway productions. In the 1965–66 season Shepard won Obie Awards (presented by the Village Voice newspaper) for his plays Chicago, Icarus’s Mother, and Red Cross.

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Shepard lived in England from 1971 to 1974, and several plays of this period—notably The Tooth of Crime (produced 1972) and Geography of a Horse Dreamer (produced 1974)—premiered in London. In late 1974 he became playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where most of his plays over the next decade were first produced.

Shepard’s works of the mid-1970s showed a heightening of earlier techniques and themes. In Killer’s Head (produced 1975), for example, the rambling monologue, a Shepard stock-in-trade, blends horror and banality in a murderer’s last thoughts before electrocution; Angel City (produced 1976) depicts the destructive machinery of the Hollywood entertainment industry; and Suicide in B-flat (produced 1976) exploits the potentials of music as an expression of character.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Shepard applied his unconventional dramatic vision to a more conventional dramatic form, the family tragedy. Curse of the Starving Class (produced 1977; film 1994), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child (produced 1978), and True West (produced 1980) are linked thematically in their examination of troubled and tempestuous blood relationships in a fragmented society.

Shepard returned to acting in the late 1970s, winning critical accolades for his performances in such films as Days of Heaven (1978); Resurrection (1980); The Right Stuff (1983), for which he received an Academy Award nomination; and Fool for Love (1985), which was written by Shepard and based on his 1983 play of the same name. In 1982 he was cast in Frances, and during the filming he began a relationship with Jessica Lange that continued until 2009. He also appeared in screen adaptations of other writers’ novels, including The Pelican Brief (1993), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), All the Pretty Horses (2000), and The Notebook (2004).

Among Shepard’s later films are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Blackthorn (2011), in which he portrayed the American outlaws Frank James and Butch Cassidy, respectively. He portrayed the hard-bitten uncle of a pair of down-and-out brothers (played by Casey Affleck and Christian Bale) in the violent small-town drama Out of the Furnace (2013) and a father whose suicide precipitates a family crisis in August: Osage County (2013), an adaptation of the play by Tracy Letts. Shepard was lauded for his grim turn as a man whose son is killed during a burglary in the darkly comic thriller Cold in July (2014). In 2016 he appeared in the drama In Dubious Battle, which was based on a John Steinbeck novel about striking farmworkers.

Shepard’s other plays include La Turista (produced 1967), The Unseen Hand (produced 1969), Operation Sidewinder (produced 1970), Seduced (produced 1978), A Lie of the Mind (produced 1985), Simpatico (produced 1994; film 1999), The God of Hell (produced 2004), Ages of the Moon (produced 2009), Heartless (produced 2012), and A Particle of Dread (first produced 2014). In addition, he published several collections of short stories, such as Day out of Days (2010). In 1986 Shepard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

While struggling with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Shepard wrote his final work, the novel Spy of the First Person. It centres on the reflections of a dying man. The book was published in December 2017, some five months after Shepard’s death.