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Sam Shepard
Shepard mulls over a scene in the motion picture Stealth, while filming on June 15, 2004, aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
Born	Samuel Shepard Rogers III November 5, 1943 (1943-11-05) (age 65) Fort Sheridan, Illinois, United States

Sam Shepard (born November 5, 1943) is an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. He is an actor of the stage and an Academy Award nominated motion pictures actor; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.

Biography

Early life

Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois and worked on a ranch as a teenager. His father, Samuel Shepard Rogers II, was a teacher, farmer and served in the Air Force as a bomber pilot during World War II;¹ his mother, Jane Elaine (née Schook) was a teacher and a native of Chicago.² After high school Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a travelling 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 Greenwich Village. During this time Shepard was using illicit drugs. He was also a drummer for the eccentric late 1960s rock band Holy Modal Rounders, featured in the movie Easy Rider.

Career

Shepard became very much involved in New York'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 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 Rocky Horror Show. After three years of living in England, in 1976 Shepard relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and was named playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre where many of his works received their premier productions. Notable work includes Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class in 1978, True West in 1980 and A Lie of the Mind in 1985. He also continued with his collaboration with Bob Dylan that started with the surrealist film Renaldo and Clara on an epic, 11 minute song entitled "Brownsville Girl", included on the 1986 Knocked Out Loaded 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, earning him an Oscar nomination in 1984. 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 on 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 playwriting 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.

In 1986, Shepard was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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.

In 2006, Shepard performed Spalding Gray's final monologue Life Interrupted for its audio release through Macmillan Audio.

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.

Shepard as a director

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, in 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 Oscar-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 Walker Samuel Shepard (born 1987). 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 '60's. However, he allowed the real Chuck Yeager to take him up in a jet plane in 1984, when he was preparing for his role as Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Awards and honors

His play Buried Child received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979.

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.

Selected Bibliography

• 1964 Cowboys
• 1964 The Rock Garden
• 1965 Chicago
• 1965 Icarus's Mother
• 1965 4-H Club
• 1966 Red Cross
• 1967 La Turista
• 1967 Cowboys #2
• 1967 Forensic & the Navigators
• 1969 The Unseen Hand
• 1969 Oh! Calcutta! (contributed sketches)
• 1970 The Holy Ghostly
• 1970 Operation Sidewinder
• 1971 Mad Dog Blues
• 1971 Back Bog Beast Bait
• 1971 Cowboy Mouth (co-written with Patti Smith)
• 1972 The Tooth of Crime
• 1975 Action
• 1976 Suicide in B Flat
• 1976 Angel City
• 1977 Inacoma
• 1978 Buried Child
• 1978 Curse of the Starving Class
• 1978 Tongues (co-written with Joseph Chaikin)
• 1980 True West
• 1981 Savage/Love (co-written with Joseph Chaikin)
• 1983 Fool for Love
• 1985 A Lie of the Mind
• 1987 A Short Life of Trouble
• 1991 States of Shock
• 1993 Simpatico
• 1995 Buried Child Revised
• 1998 Eyes for Consuela
• 2000 The Late Henry Moss
• 2004 The God of Hell
• 2007 Kicking a Dead Horse

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

Filmography

Actor

• 1965 Rusakai - Unknown
• 1970 Brand X - Unknown
• 1978 Renaldo and Clara - Rodeo
• 1978 Days of Heaven - The Farmer
• 1980 Resurrection - Cal Carpenter
• 1982 Frances - Harry York
• 1983 The Right Stuff - Chuck Yeager
• 1984 Paris, Texas - unconfirmed
• 1984 Country - Gil Ivy
• 1986 Crimes of the Heart - Doc Porter
• 1987 Baby Boom - Dr. Jeff Cooper
• 1989 Steel Magnolias - Spud Jones
• 1991 The Voyager - Walter Faber
• 1992 Thunderheart - Frank Coutelle
• 1993 The Pelican Brief - Professor Thomas Callahan
• 1995 Streets of Laredo (film)- Pea Eye Parker
• 1999 Snow Falling on Cedars - Arthur Chambers
• 1999 Purgatory - Sheriff Forrest/Wild Bill Hickock
• 2000 Hamlet - The Ghost
• 2001 Black Hawk Down - Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison
• 2001 Kurosawa - Narrator
• 2001 Shot in the Heart - Frank Gilmore
• 2001 Swordfish - Senator James Reisman
• 2001 The Pledge - Eric Pollack
• 2004 The Notebook - Frank Calhoun
• 2005 Don't Come Knocking - Howard
• 2005 Bandidas - Bill Buck
• 2005 Stealth - Capt. George Cummings
• 2006 Walker Payne - Syrus
• 2006 The Return - Ed Mills
• 2006 Charlotte's Web (Narrator)
• 2007 Ruffian - Frank Whiteley
• 2007 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Frank James
• 2008 The Accidental Husband - Wilder
• 2008 Felon - Gordon Camrose

Screenwriter

• 1968 Me and My Brother, dir: Robert Frank
• 1970 Zabriskie Point, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni
• 1984 Paris, Texas, dir: Wim Wenders
• 1985 Fool for Love, dir: Robert Altman
• 2005 Don't Come Knocking, dir: Wim Wenders

Director

• 1988 Far North (also screenplay)
• 1994 Silent Tongue (also screenplay)

References

External links

• Sam Shepard at the Internet Movie Database
• Sam Shepard at the Internet Broadway Database
• The Sam Shepard Web Site
• "Brownsville Girl", by Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard
• Sam Shepard at the Open Directory Project