Playwright and actor Sam Shepard dead at 73 from complications of ALS

by Janet Smith on July 31st, 2017 at 10:51 AM

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Influential playwright, screenwriter, director, author, and actor Sam Shepard, whose scripts are frequently performed on stages in Vancouver and around the world, has died.

His family has reportedly confirmed to the New York Times that he passed away Thursday (July 27) from complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

His play Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, premiered, along with many of his other masterworks, during a decade as playwright-in-residence at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. His other famous plays, many about the darker side of family life, include A Lie of the Mind, Fool for Love, True West, and Cowboy Mouth, which he created with Patti Smith. His sometimes bleak, ironic outlook on life could be summed up by his words in the radio play The War in Heaven: “Every second I'm here, I'm weakening....I am here by mistake.” Shepard was once named the greatest American playwright of his generation by The New Yorker.

On-screen, Shepard is perhaps best known as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, a role for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Indie film buffs also remember him as cowriter of the cult masterpiece Paris, Texas. In the last decade, he starred in everything from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to Killing Them Softly to Brothers and August: Osage County.

Shepard was married to actress Jessica Lange, who he met on the set of the film Frances, for almost 30 years.