Actor, Pulitzer-winning playwright Sam Shepard dies at 73

Sam Shepard, the handsome rock and roll cowboy, whose work as a playwright, screenwriter, actor and director from the 1960s onward served up emblematic portraits of the dystopian American dream, the breakdown of the American family, and the destruction of the mythic vision of the American West, died Thursday. He was 73. Mr. Shepard had been ill with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) for some time, and reportedly died peacefully at his home in Kentucky, surrounded by his children and sisters.

Mr. Shepard’s work (he wrote more than 40 plays) was championed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre whose 1982 production of “True West” (directed by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich and Sinise), became an Off Broadway hit, and aired on the PBS series, “American Playhouse,” in 1984. The company’s 1995 revival of “Buried Child” (for which the playwright had received a 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), began in Chicago with a cast that included Ethan Hawke and Lois Smith, and moved to Broadway in 1996.

Born Nov. 5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, Sam Shepard was the son of a father who served as a U.S. Army Air Force bomber pilot in World War II, and whose alcoholism and paternal absenteeism became an abiding theme in his plays. His mother, a Chicago native, was a teacher.

Mr. Shepard grew up in California, and early on became hooked on the absurdist dramas of Samuel Beckett, as well as jazz and the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters. By the early 1960s he had moved to New York (where he initially roomed with Charlie Mingus. Jr., the son of fabled jazz musician Charles Mingus, who he knew from his high school days) and became involved in the burgeoning Off-Off Broadway scene of the period. Between 1966 and 1984 he would win 11 Obie Awards, for such plays as “The Tooth of Crime, ” Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love.”

“The interesting thing about Sam’s plays are how pliable they are,” said John Malkovich, reached by phone on Monday, and whose performance in “True West” catapulted him to fame. “He loved surprises; he loved to see what was going to happen. And I think that’s one big reason why Steppenwolf loved his work, and why he had an affection for Steppenwolf.”

“He also was so recognizably American,” said the actor. “You felt the great freedom he had in making his plays, and in the way individual actors could play them — the way you could move things around and the play would move with you. That’s not something you could do with Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard.”

Many of Mr. Shepard’s most renowned works were created during his time as playwright-in-residence at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, starting in 1975. They included “Buried Child” (1978), a blackly comic variation on a Greek tragedy, about a dysfunctional Illinois farm family; “True West” (1980), the tale of two very different brothers whose ferocious competition for Hollywood fame results in something of a total about-face; “Fool for Love” (1983), about the encounter between a woman and her ex-lover in a run-down motel in the Mojave Desert, which was turned into a 1986 Robert Altman film; and “A Lie of the Mind” (1985), the tale of two families dealing with a life-altering case of marital violence, played out in an isolated cabin during a frosty Montana winter.

All these plays had a powerful streak of anger, sadness and dislocation, and were fueled with the desire for love, success, family connection and the opposing pull of self-destruction. In a sense, Mr. Shepard, who was rooted in the tail end of the Beat Generation and fueled by the upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, was a punk outlaw before that term even existed. His 1971 play, “Cowboy Mouth,” a quasi-autobiographical collaboration written and performed by his then lover, Patti Smith, first put the now iconic singer-songwriter on the map.

His screenwriting credits included Michelangelo Antonioni’s counterculture classic, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), and (as co-writer) “Paris, Texas” (1984).

With his lean figure and latter-day Marlboro Man good looks, Mr. Shepard also forged a significant place as a film actor with memorable early roles as an ailing farmer in Terence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978); as Frances Farmer’s Communist lover in “Frances” (1982), the film in which he met actress Jessica Lange, who would become his second wife; as the gonzo test pilot Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff” (1983), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor; as Doc Porter in “Crimes of the Heart” (1986); in “Steel Magnolias,” in which he played Dolly Parton’s husband, and dozens more, up until his final role in “Never Here,” a thriller that premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June.

Other film credits include “August: Osage County,” “The Notebook” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

“There was not much narcissism in Sam,” Malkovich said, who described the playwright as “super American, incredibly authentic, free of b——, quick to laugh, horse crazy, and with a humility that was very charming. He also led an interesting life, and tried to stay out of the spotlight as much as possible. I think he was amused by being a movie actor. Yes, Chuck Yeager was a great part for him, and it checked many of his boxes. But he was essentially a theater person, with all that is organic and ephemeral about the live stage. I still remember how he thought the greatest theatrical feat was when I ate a huge ice cream sundae while performing a monologue in ‘States of Shock,’ an antiwar play of his written at the time of the Persian Gulf war, which we did at the American Place Theatre in 1991.”

“Buried Child” actress Lois Smith said: “While I didn’t have a close personal friendship with Sam, I felt privileged to have known and worked with him, as well as to begin to see his plays during my early days in New York. I first met him when we were both acting in a film, ‘Resurrection’ in Texas. I had been kind of dumb-struck when I first saw ‘Buried Child’ in New York, and to have been able to be in the production of it at Steppenwolf and on Broadway — during which time he spent rehearsals with us in both cities — is one of my more important milestones and grateful memories. Later, I ran into him at a screening when he said he was writing a new play for Signature Theatre with a part for me. It turned out to be ‘Heartless’ [a Shepard play in which the rare focus is on the mother], and so, another privileged rehearsal and production period with Sam.”

Gallery“I think the last time I saw him was last year on opening night for a ‘Buried Child’ revival at Signature,” said Smith. “I hadn’t realized he was ill, but he was having difficulty handling objects. I grieve his loss, celebrate his life and work, and give thanks for my part in it.”

Mr. Shepard was married from 1969 to 1984 to actress O-Lan Jones, with whom he had son Jesse Mojo Shepard. While making the 1982 Frances Farmer biopic “Frances,” he met Jessica Lange and the two remained together for nearly 30 years. They had two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. They separated in 2009. Lange once said of Mr. Shepard: “No man I’ve ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness.”

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. Mr. Shepard and music icon 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.”

Mr. Shepard’s television credits include the role of Robert Rayburn on the Netflix series “Bloodline,” the Discovery Channel miniseries “Klondike,” and CBS’ “Lonesome Dove” sequel “Streets of Laredo.”

His full-length work of fiction, “The One Inside,” came out earlier this year. The book is a highly personal narrative about a man looking back on his life and taking in what has been lost, including control over his own body as the symptoms of ALS advance. Mr. Shepard’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf, LuAnn Walther, said Shepard’s language was “quite poetic, and very intimate, but also very direct and plainspoken.” She said that when people asked her what Shepard was really like, she would respond, “Just read the fiction.”

In Mr. Shepard’s 1982 book “Motel Chronicles,” he said that he felt like he never had a home. That feeling, he later, acknowledged, always remained.

“I basically live out of my truck,” Mr. Shepard said in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press. “I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say. But it’s true.”

Mr. Shepard is survived by his children, Jesse, Hannah and Walker Shepard, and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers. Funeral arrangements remain private.

Contributing: Sun-Times staff reporter Miriam Di Nunzio; Associated Press

Hollywood took to Twitter on Monday to talk about Shepard’s passing: