Sam Shepard, the bard of America’s flat highways, wide-open spaces and wounding, dysfunctional families, has died at the age of 73 in his home in Kentucky from complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease, his family announced Monday.
Shepard found incredible success as both a playwright and as an actor. He won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his 1979 play, Buried Child, and wrote 40 plays over the course of his career. He also wrote the screenplays for Zabriskie Point; Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas; and Robert Altman's Fool for Love, a film version of his play of the same title. As writer/director, he filmed Far North and Silent Tongue in 1988 and 1992 respectively.
A famously intense and taciturn actor, Shepard broke out as a Hollywood actor in Terrence Malick’s “Days Of Heaven” (1978), playing opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. For his appearance in “The Right Stuff” (1983), he was nominated for an Academy Award. And many fans adore his work in Wim Wenders’ acclaimed “Paris, Texas” (1984) for which Shepard co-wrote the screenplay. His Hollywood portfolio was diverse, encompassing “Crimes of the Heart,” “Steel Magnolias” and “Black Hawk Down.”
Shepard played the Weston patriarch in the 2013 movie version of Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” originally a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that owed much to his structural and thematic influence — an influence that extends to Ireland and the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.
Shepard was romantically involved with the actress Jessica Lange from 1982 to 2009, although the pair never married. They had two children together: Hannah Jane Shepard, 31, and Samuel Walker Shepard, 30.