Everything about Sam Shepard totally explained
Sam Shepard (born
November 5,
1943) is an American artist who worked as an award-winning
playwright,
writer and
actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often
absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern
American west. He is an actor of the stage and
motion pictures; 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; his mother, Jane Elaine (
née Schook) was a teacher and a native of
Chicago. 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'd 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 but doomed 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 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 didn't 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 hasn't directed plays by other playwrights. He has also directed two films but apparently doesn't 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's 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've been together ever since. They have two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker 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 a famous pilot 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.
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.
He has also won a Drama Desk Award for his play
A Lie of the Mind.
For his work in television he's been nominated for both an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and most recently a Screen Actor's Guild award for best actor in a miniseries.
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
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
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)Further Information
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