Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He died in a car crash in New York City on October 31, 2013.

About Sam Shepard in brief

Summary Sam ShepardSamuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career spanned half a century. He won ten Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most won 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 his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. 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. New York magazine described Shepard as \”the greatest American playwright of his generation. ” Shepard was also a patron of the Chelsea Hotel scene, and contributed to the band The Holy Modal Rounders, appearing on their albums Indian War War and Who Who War. He died in a car crash in New York City on October 31, 2013. He is survived by his wife, Jane Elaine, and their three children. He also leaves behind a son, Steve Rogers, and a daughter, Sarah Shepard Rogers, both of whom he also played in the film version of The right Stuff. The family lived in Duarte, California, where he wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs.

Shepard died on October 30, 2013, at the age of 83. He leaves behind his wife and three children, Sarah, Steve, and Sarah Shepard, and his son, Samuel Shepard Rogers Jr. He was also the grandfather of two sons, Sam Shepard, III, and Samuel Shepard, Jr., who died in 2011. He had a son named Steve Rogers IV, who was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. The father was a teacher and farmer who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a bomber pilot during World War II. Shepard moved to New York in 1963 and found work as a busboy at the Village Gate nightclub. In 1965, he founded the experimental stage company Theater Genesis, housed at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village. Two of Shepard’s earliest one-act plays, \”The Rock Garden\” and \”Cowboys\”, debuted at Theater Genesis in October 1964. In 1969, Jeff Bleckner directed Shepard’s science fiction play The Unseen Hand at La MaMa. In 1970, he directed The Un Seen Hand alongside Forensic and the Navigators at the nearby Astor Place Theater. In 1983, the Overtone Theatre and New Writers at the Westside co-produced Shepard’splays Superstitions and The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife at LaMa.