Sam Shepard: influential voice of his generation

Despite dozens of plays, film stardom and the spotlight of celebrity, Sam Shepard was an inscrutable figure.

Sam Shepard, who has died aged 73, is best remembered for his influential plays. Picture: AP

Despite dozens of personal plays to his name, film stardom and the spotlight of celebrity and acclaim, Shepard was an inscrutable figure, an American myth in plain sight. He was a man of few words who produced 44 plays and num­erous books, memoirs and short stories. He was one of the most influential playwrights of his generation: a plain-spoken poet of the modern frontier, lyrical and rugged.

In his 1971 one-act Cowboy Mouth, which he wrote with his then girlfriend, musician and poet Patti Smith, one character says: “People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth” — and this was a role the tall and handsome Shepard fulfilled for many.

He wrote and lived as if life were its own jazz composition — skipping from a postwar California avocado ranch to New York’s experimental East Village theatre scene of the 1960s, then to London and Hollywood and back again. Shepard once said he did his best writing on the road, one hand on the steering wheel and one holding the pen. He advised that this was best done on a wide open highway, not in Manhattan.

“I was writing basically for actors,” Shepard said in 2011. “And actors immediately seemed to have a handle on it, on the rhythm of it, the sound of it, the characters. I started to understand there was this possibility of conversation between actors and that’s how it all started.”

Shepard’s Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant film star, too. He appeared in dozens of films — many of them westerns — including Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Steel Magnolias, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 2012’s Mud. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as test pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff.

But Shepard was best remembered for his influential plays and his prominent role in the off-off-Broadway movement. His 1979 play Buried Child won the Pulitzer for drama. Two other plays — True West, about two warring brothers, and Fool for Love, about a man who fears he’s turning into his father — were nominated for Pulitzers as well. All are frequently revived: in 2010, for example, Philip Seymour Hoffman directed a Sydney Theatre Company production of True West, starring Brendan Cowell and Wayne Blair.

“I always felt like playwriting was the thread through all of it,” Shepard said in 2011. “Theatre real­ly when you think about it contains everything. It can contain film. Film can’t contain theatre. Music. Dance. Painting. Acting. It’s the whole deal. And it’s the most ancient. It goes back to the Druids. It was way pre-Christ. It’s the form that I feel most at home in because of that, because of its ability to usurp everything.”

Shepard took acting gigs more frequently as he grew older. One film, he said, could pay for 16 plays. Besides his plays, Shepard wrote short stories and a full-length work of fiction, The One Inside, which came out this year. The One Inside is a personal narrative about a man looking back on his life and taking in what has been lost, including control over his own body as the symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis advance.

Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943. He grew up on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California. As a kid he went by the name Steve Rogers, and claimed he was unaware until much later that it was Captain America’s civilian name.

His father was an alcoholic schoolteacher and former army pilot. Shepard would later write frequently of the damage done by drunks. He had his own struggles, too; long stretches of sobriety were interrupted by drink driving arrests. Shepard spent his teen years generally apathetic towards school and looking for a way out of the banality of the postwar suburb.

Shepard arrived in New York in 1963 with no connections, little money and vague aspirations to act, write or make music. “I just dropped in out of nowhere,” he said in 2010. He quickly became part of the off-off-Broadway movement at downtown hangouts such as Caffe Cino and La MaMa. “As far as I’m concerned, Broadway just does not exist,” Shepard said in 1970, though many of his later plays would end up there.

His early plays — fiery, surreal verbal assaults — pushed American theatre in an energised, frenzied direction that matched the times. A drummer himself, Shepard found his own rock ‘n roll rhythm. Seeking spontaneity, he initially refused to rewrite his drafts, a strategy he later dismissed as “just plain stupid”. As Shepard grew as a playwright, he returned again and again to meditations on violence, masculinity and family. His collection Seven Plays, which includes many of his best plays, including Buried Child and The Tooth of Crime, was dedicated to his father.

“There’s some hidden, deeply rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that invariably is violent,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “This sense of failure runs very deep — maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s the source of a lot of intrigue for me.”

His connection to music was constant. He joined Bob Dylan on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and co-wrote Brownsville Girl with him. Shepard and Smith were one-time lovers but lifetime friends. “We’re just the same,” Smith once said. “When Sam and I are together, it’s like no particular time.” Shepard’s film career began in the late 70s. While making the 1982 Frances Farmer biopic Frances he met Jessica Lange and the two remained together for nearly 30 years. They separated in 2009. Lange once said of Shepard: “No man I’ve ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness.”

Shepard saw the absurdities in his own life, too. In April 1979, he was informed that he’d won the Pulitzer for Buried Child on the same day it closed. Whether humble or a restless perfectionist, Shepard would downplay his own accolades. Of Buried Child, Shepard said there were several lines he thought were “toe-scrunchers”. Although well-versed in Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, Shepard spoke of his career as a playwright as though it were an accident.

He made his film debut in Malick’s 1978 dreamy period piece Days of Heaven as a wealthy, isolated farmer and romantic foe to Richard Gere. He’d go on to embody classic masculinity as Yeager in The Right Stuff, for which he’d score an Oscar nomination, and charm Lange in Frances and then Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. Aside from his acting, his ideas left an indelible mark on cinema: he dreamt up Paris, Texas with Wim Wenders and LM Kit Carson.

It was almost ironic that later in life Shepard found himself playing men like those in his father’s generation. He was memorable as the general in Black Hawk Down, the outlaw older brother of Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a hot-headed patriarch in the Netflix series Bloodline and Ryan Gosling’s country father in The Note­book. Shepard was that perfect bundle of contradictions that only an artist could justify: someone who craved privacy and outwardly resented the opposite yet acted in films and revealed his rawest truths in the pages of his plays. Or perhaps he wasn’t so oblique after all, just too complicated for the Hollywood celebrity machine.

“Here is a man who could see right through you, who would smell bullshit from a mile,” Wenders once said. “He’d rather hurt you than be dishonest. There is no front. He is just all true. With a dissecting sense of humour.”

Sam Shepard Playwright, actor and author. Born Illinois, November 5 1943. Died Kentucky, July 30, Aged 73.

AP