Sam shepard biography 1943 dime
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He appeared in Lewis Carlino’s Resurrection in 1980.
In March 2012, Sam shared the stage with Patti Smith at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. When summer rolled around, he headed to New York City where his new play, "Heartless" premiered at the Signature Theatre. Reflecting on this time, he later told an interviewer, “I got into writing plays because I had nothing else to do.
And then he started yelling at the actors again.” By the mid-1980s, as he reached his forties, Shepard was the second most widely-performed American playwright after Tennessee Williams.
WATCH: REMEMBERING SAM SHEPARD
WATCH: SAM SHEPARD ON HIS FAMILY
The Intrepid Artist-Cowboy
In addition to play-writing, Shepard had a successful career as an actor.
After receiving an OBIE for "Melodrama Play" (1968) and "Cowboys #2" (1968), Sam received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Meanwhile, he joined Bob Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Revue," the singer-songwriter's traveling band of musicians who covered the northern hemisphere in the mid-1970s.
Remarkably, he returned to performing on stage for the second time in his career ("Cowboy Mouth" being the first in 1971) and co-starred with Dallas Roberts in the Caryl Churchill cloning drama, "A Number", which opened Off-Broadway in November 2004.
It was time to team up once more with Wim Wenders as scriptwriter and lead actor for "Don't Come Knocking" (2005).
He was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He worked in experimental downtown spaces such as La Mama, Cafe Cino, and the Open Theatre, winning six Obie (off-Broadway) Awards over the next few years. After his divorce from O-lan, he never married again probably recognizing his distaste for fidelity.
On December 5, his last book, "Spy of the Last Person" was published.
Sam spent most of November in Ireland preparing for his new play, "A Particle of Dread", which premiered at the Londonderry: City of Culture festival. Biographer John J. Winters wrote that this role established Shepard’s on-screen persona as “the intrepid artist-cowboy of popular imagination,” which would blur with his writing.
The family finally settled in Duarte, CA where Sam graduated from high school in 1961. After touring with them during 1962-1963, he moved to New York City and worked as a bus boy at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village.
Sam began focusing his efforts on writing a series of of avant-garde one-act plays and eventually found his way to the off-off-Broadway scene to Theatre Genesis, a ragtag group that met in an upstairs room at St.
Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. After producing the lesser-known "A Short Life of Trouble" (1987), he co-starred in Beth Henley's quirky drama "Crimes of the Heart" (1986) with Diane Keaton and again with the Oscar-winning actress in the romantic comedy "Baby Boom" (1987).
His family moved frequently and eventually settled on an avocado farm in Duarte, California. In June the Wittliff Collections at Texas State opened a new literary exhibition to showcase the Shepard archives. A book was also published by Texas State in conjunction with the exhibit called "Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark".
His first film role was as a dying farmer in Days of Heaven (1978). The author of nearly 60 plays, numerous works of prose, and a long career in film, Shepard’s influence on American theater, cinema and literature runs deep.
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BIOGRAPHY | SAM SHEPARD
The Farmer’s Son
Born in Illinois in 1943, Samuel Shepard Rogers III (known as Steve Rogers as boy) was the son of a former Army pilot and a teacher.