Sam Shepard (born November
5, 1943) is an American
playwright, actor, and
television and film director. He is author of several
books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama in
1979 for his play,
Buried
Child. As a film actor, Shepard is perhaps best known for
his Academy Award nominated portrayal of pilot
Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff (1983).
Early years
Born
Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort
Sheridan
, Illinois
, he worked
on a ranch as a teenager. His father, Samuel Shepard Rogers,
Jr., was a teacher, farmer, and served in the
United States Army Air Forces
as a
bomber pilot
during
World War II.
His mother, Jane
Elaine Schook, was a teacher and a native of Chicago
,
Illinois. After high school Shepard briefly attended
college, but dropped out to join a traveling theater group.
He avoided
the draft during the Vietnam
era by
claiming to be a heroin addict.
The year
1963 found him working as a busboy in Manhattan
's Greenwich Village
in New York
City
, New
York
. During this time Shepard was using illicit
drugs. He was also a drummer for the eccentric late-1960s rock band
The Holy Modal Rounders,
featured in the movie
Easy Rider
(1969).
Career
Shepard became very much involved in New York City's
Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, beginning
at the age of nineteen.
Although his plays were staged at several
Off-Off-Broadway venues, he was most closely connected with Theatre
Genesis, housed at St. Mark's Church
in-the-Bowery
in Manhattan's East Village
. He acted occasionally in those days, but
his interests were almost strictly confined to writing, up until
the late 1970s. Most of his writing was for the stage, but he had
early screen-writing credits for
Me and My Brother (1968) and
Antonioni's
Zabriskie Point (1970). His
early science-fiction play,
The Unseen Hand, influenced
Richard O'Brien's
stage musical Rocky Horror Show.
After three years of
living in England
, in 1976
Shepard relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area
in California
and was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco where many of
his works received their premier productions. Notable work
includes
Buried Child (1978),
Curse of the Starving
Class (1978),
True
West (1980) and
A Lie of
the Mind (1985). He also continued with his collaboration
with
Bob Dylan that started with the
surrealist film
Renaldo and
Clara (1978) and co-wrote with Dylan an epic, 11-minute
song entitled "
Brownsville Girl",
included on Dylan's
Knocked Out
Loaded (1986) album and later compilations.
Shepard began his acting career in earnest when he was cast as the
handsome land baron in
Terrence
Malick's
Days of Heaven
(1978), opposite
Richard Gere and
Brooke Adams. This led to other
important films and roles, most notably his portrayal of
Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff (1983), earning
him an
Academy Award nomination for
Best Supporting
Actor. By 1986, one of his plays,
Fool for Love, was being made into
a film directed by
Robert Altman; his
play
A Lie of the Mind
was
Off-Broadway with an all-star cast
including
Harvey Keitel and
Geraldine Page; he was living with
Jessica Lange; and he was working steadily as
a film actor—all of which put him on the cover of
Newsweek magazine. Earlier in his life, during
the rebellion of the 1960s, Shepard had vowed famously, "I never
want to be on the cover of
Newsweek." Things had
changed.
Throughout the years, Shepard has done a considerable amount of
teaching on writing plays and other aspects of theatre. His classes
and seminars have occurred at various theatre workshops, festivals,
and universities. During the 1970s he served a stint as a Regents
Professor at the University of California, Davis.
Shepard was elected to
The American Academy of
Arts and Letters in 1986.
In 2000, Shepard decided to repay a debt of gratitude to the Magic
Theatre by staging his play
The
Late Henry Moss as a benefit in San Francisco. The cast
included
Nick Nolte,
Sean Penn,
Woody
Harrelson, and
Cheech Marin. The
limited, three-month run was sold out.
He performed
Spalding Gray's final
monologue
Life Interrupted for its audio release through
Macmillan Audio in 2006.
In 2007, Shepard was featured playing
banjo on
Patti Smith's cover of
Nirvana's song, "
Smells Like Teen Spirit", on her
album
Twelve.
Although many artists have had an influence on Shepard's work, one
of the most significant has been actor-director
Joseph Chaikin, a veteran of the
Living Theatre and founder of a group called
the Open Theatre. The two have often worked together on various
projects, and Shepard acknowledges that Chaikin has been a valuable
mentor.
Directing
At the beginning of his playwriting career, Shepard did not direct
his own plays. His earliest plays were directed by a number of
different directors but most frequently by Ralph Cook, the founder
of Theatre Genesis. Later, while living at the Flying Y Ranch in
Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco, Shepard formed a
successful playwright-director relationship with Robert Woodruff,
who directed the premiere of
Buried
Child (1978), among other plays. During the 1970s, though,
Shepard decided that his vision of his plays required that he
should direct them himself. He has since directed many of his own
plays, but with a few rare exceptions, he has not directed plays by
other playwrights. He has also directed two films but apparently
does not see film direction as a major interest.
Personal life
When Shepard first arrived in New York, he roomed with Charlie
Mingus, Jr., a friend of his from high school and son of the famous
jazz musician. Then he lived with actress Joyce Aaron. He later
married actress
O-Lan Jones (born O-Lan
Johnson, alias O-Lan Johnson Dark, alias O-Lan Barna) from 1969 to
1984, with whom he has one son, Jesse Mojo Shepard (born 1970).
After the end of his relationship with the singer and musician
Patti Smith, Shepard met
Academy-Award-winning actress
Jessica Lange on the set of a movie they both
starred in,
Frances. He moved in
with her in 1983, and they have been together ever since. They have
two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker Shepard
(born 1987)
[25927]. In 2005 Jesse Shepard wrote a book of
short stories which was published in San Francisco, and his father
appeared together with him at a reading to introduce the
book.
Although he played the legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff, and
went through an airliner crash in the film
Voyager (1992),
Shepard is known for his aversion to flying. According to one
account, he vowed never to fly again after a very rocky trip on an
airliner coming back from Mexico in the 1960s. However, he allowed
the real Chuck Yeager to take him up in a jet plane in 1982 when he
was preparing for his role as Yeager in
The Right Stuff.
In the
early morning hours of January 3, 2009, Shepard was arrested and
charged with speeding and drunken driving in Normal,
Illinois
; his
blood alcohol content was
allegedly 0.175. Shepard was taken to the McLean County Jail,
in Bloomington,
IL
, and posted bond after processing. He
pleaded guilty to both charges on February 11, 2009 and was
sentenced to 24 months probation, alcohol education classes, and
100 hours of community service.
Awards and honors
Shepard received the
Pulitzer
Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play,
Buried
Child.
For his portrayal of
test pilot Chuck Yeager in the film
The Right Stuff, Shepard was
nominated for an
Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actor in 1983.
His screenplay for the 1984
Wim Wenders
film
Paris, Texas
garnered him a nomination for a
BAFTA Award for Best
Adapted Screenplay.
In 1986, Shepard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. He received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in
1992.
In 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. Of his more
than forty-five plays, eleven of them have won
Obie Awards. He was nominated for two
Tony Awards for
Buried Child in 1996, and for
True West in 2000.
For his performance as Dashiell Hammett in the 1999 TV movie
Dash and Lilly he received
Emmy and
Golden
Globe nominations for "Best Actor in a Miniseries or
Movie".
He has also won a Drama Desk Award for his play
A Lie of the Mind.
His most recent accolade was a 2008
SAG nomination for "Outstanding
Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries"
for his performance as Frank Whiteley in
Ruffian.
Archives
The Sam
Shepard papers at the Wittliff
collections of Southwestern Writers, Texas State
University
, were donated by the author and comprise some 26
boxes of material.
Bibliography
Collections
- Seven Plays, Dial Press,
1984, 368 pages, ISBN 0-553-34611-3
- Fool For Love and Other Plays, Bantam, 1984, 320
pages, ISBN 0-553-34590-7
- The Unseen Hand: and Other Plays, Vintage, 1996, 400
pages, ISBN 0-679-76789-4
- Cruising Paradise, Vintage, 1997, 255 pages, ISBN
0-679-74217-4
- Great Dream Of Heaven Vintage, 2003, 160 pages, ISBN
0-375-70452-3
- Rolling Thunder Logbook, Da Capo, 2004 reissue, 176
pages, ISBN 0-306-81371-8
- Motel Chronicles, City Lights, 1983, ISBN
0-87286-143-0
- Hawk Moon, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.
Filmography
Actor
Screenwriter
Director
References
- Sam Shepherd Guilty of Very Drunken Driving
TMZ.com, February 11, 2009
- Sam Shepard Papers at the Wittliff Collections,
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
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