NEW YORK (AP) Old enough to see the rustic world of his childhood disappear, Sam Shepard was a new kind of man who brought a new kind of language to the American stage.
“In True West,” “Buried Child” and other groundbreaking plays, Shepard’s characters spoke with a rugged poetry and raw introspection rarely heard from out of men and women from the American West. Like William Faulkner writing about the American South, Shepard gave voice to a society haunted by decline and defeat and a fear of being on the wrong side of an old and moral argument.
The handsome, taciturn Shepard was shaped by the frontier life he mourned and critiqued and by the revolutionary changes of the post-World War II era that helped upend it. He looked like an heir to Gary Cooper and other stars of Hollywood Westerns, but he was an artist for a rebellious and challenging time. 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” – a role Shepard fulfilled for many.
Shepard was best remembered for his wrenching plays and his prominent role in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. His 1979 drama “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 – also were nominated for Pulitzers.
His many film credits included 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 pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s “The Right Stuff” and wrote Wim Wenders’ acclaimed 1984 drama “Paris, Texas”). He took acting gigs more frequently as he grew older and noted that one movie could pay for 16 plays.
In Shepard’s 1982 book “Motel Chronicles,” he said that he felt like he never had a home. That feeling, he later, acknowledged, always remained.