- Born
- Died
- Place
Sam Shepard
Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was an American playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, and author whose career spanned half a century. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for portraying pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described Shepard as "the greatest American playwright of his generation."
Shepard's plays are known for their bleak, poetic, surrealist elements, black comedy, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society. His style evolved from the absurdism of his early off-off-Broadway work to the realism of later plays like Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class.
As actor
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
Never Here
California Typewriter
Midnight Special
In Dubious Battle
Ithaca
Cold in July
Mud
August: Osage County
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
Out of the Furnace
Savannah
Killing Them Softly
Safe House
Darling Companion
Shepard & Dark
Blackthorn
Inhale
Fair Game
Brothers
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Felon
The Accidental Husband
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Ruffian
The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose
The Return
Bandidas
Charlotte's Web
Walker Payne
