Writer and performer won Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1979 and Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff
courtesy CBC News Posted: Jul 31, 2017
Sam Shepard, the famed playwright, director and actor, has died at age 73 in Kentucky. (Charles Sykes/Associated Press)
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Shepard died at his Kentucky home last Thursday of complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), according to Chris Boneau, a spokesperson for the Shepard family.
“The family requests privacy at this difficult time,” Boneau said in a statement.
Shepard was an award-winning playwright (his Buried Child earned a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979), accomplished writer and celebrated actor, picking up an Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff in 1984.
While perhaps most famous for his plays, Shepard was also an actor. Here, he arrives for a Venice Film Festival screening of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (Andrew Medichini/Associated Press)
Since the 1960s, Shepard had published dozens of plays that made their way to the stage, developing a reputation for bleak stories about people on the fringes of U.S. society. Cowboys, A Life of the Mind, Fool for Love and his trilogy Chicago, Icarus’s Mother and Red Cross are among his many noted stage productions.
He also maintained a career as an actor in Hollywood, with credits including Days of Heaven, Steel Magnolias and Crimes of the Heart, and Netflix’s recent series Bloodline.
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