Shepard, Sam, 1943–, American playwright and actor, b. Fort Sheridan, Ill., as Samuel Shepard Rogers 7th. A product of the 1960s counterculture, Shepard combines wild humor, grotesque satire, myth, and a sparse, haunting language evocative of Western movies to create a subversive pop art pop art, a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism . British and American pop artists employed a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express
..... Click the link for more information. vision of America. His settings are often a kind of nowhere land on the American Plains, his characters are typically loners and drifters caught between a mythical past and the mechanized present, and his works often concern deeply troubled families. His many plays include Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978; Pulitzer Prize), True West (1980), A Lie of the Mind (1985), States of Shock (1991), Simpatico (1994), The Late Henry Moss (2000), and The God of Hell (2004). Also involved in motion pictures, Shepard wrote the screenplays for The Right Stuff (1983), in which he played the part of Chuck Yeager Yeager, Chuck (Charles Elwood Yeager), 1923–, American aviator. A fighter pilot during World War II, he was a test pilot during the early postwar years.
..... Click the link for more information. , and Paris, Texas (1984); wrote and directed Far North (1989) and Silent Tongue (1994); and has acted in a number of other films. His other work includes the stories, meditations, and reminiscences collected in Motel Chronicles (1982), Cruising Paradise (1996), and Great Dream of Heaven (2002).

Shepard, Sam

orig. Samuel Shepard Rogers

(born Nov. 5, 1943, Fort Sheridan, Ill., U.S.) U.S. playwright and actor. He worked as an actor and rock musician before turning to playwriting; his early one-act dramas and experimental plays were performed Off-Broadway in the 1960s, winning several Obie Awards. His successful full-length plays, noted for their often surreal images drawn from the American West, science fiction, and popular culture, include The Tooth of Crime (1972), Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979, Pulitzer Prize), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983; film, 1985), and Simpatico (1996). He wrote the screenplay for Paris, Texas (1984) and acted in numerous movies, including Days of Heaven (1978) and The Right Stuff (1983).

Shepard, Sam (b. Samuel Shepard Rogers VII) (1943– ) playwright, actor; born in Fort Sheridan, Ill. He was raised in California and studied agricultural science at Mount Antonio Junior College there (1960–61). He moved to New York City (1962), worked as an actor and a rock musician. His career as a playwright began in 1964 with Theatre Genesis's Obie Award-winning productions of Cowboy and The Rock Garden. Although he won critical acclaim and a small following, his offbeat and off-Broadway plays did not bring him much financial success, and he moved to England (1971–75) where he wrote his rock-drama, The Tooth of Crime (1972). He returned to see a steady stream of his stage plays produced—Buried Child (1978) won the Pulitzer—while he also wrote film scripts and appeared in several movies, including The Right Stuff (1983). Both the critics and public have found it difficult to categorize his iconoclastic approach to drama, agreeing only that it seems disturbingly to reflect the contemporary American scene, and he remains somewhat elusive and ambiguous as a force in the modern theater.