SAM SHEPARD

(5 November 1943 - 27 July 2017)

The American playwright, actor, essayist and director Sam Shepard, who has died at the age of 73 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, originally trained to be a vet. However, from 1962, Shepard became involved in theatre and pursued a very successful career acting on stage and in films. He was prolific in all his fields of endeavour, writing over forty plays including The Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, True West, Fool for Love, Licking a Dead Horse and Buried Child, the last winning him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote short stories, essays and memoirs, directed and acted in plays and films and was nominated for an Oscar for his role as pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983). After acting and writing for the stage, he made his screen debut in Brand X (1970) and in the same year contributed to the screenplay of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. He continued to act in films, including Days of Heaven, Frances and Crimes of the Heart (both with Jessica Lange, who became his partner), Fool for Love, (from his own script), Steel Magnolias, The Pelican Brief, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mud and August: Osage County, among many other titles. From 1995 until 2017 he also wrote and appeared in television films. Among the cinema films he wrote are Paris, Texas, Fool for Love, Far North and Silent Tongue, the last two of which he also directed. His first wife was actress O-Lan Jones, with whom Shepard had a son, Jesse, and he had two children, Hannah and Samuel, with Jessica Lange. They separated in 2009 after 27 years together.

MICHAEL DARVELL