Sam Shepard

Biography

Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was an American playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, and author whose career spanned half a century. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for portraying pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described Shepard as "the greatest American playwright of his generation." Shepard's plays are known for their bleak, poetic, surrealist elements, black comedy, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society. His style evolved from the absurdism of his early off-off-Broadway work to the realism of later plays like Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sam Shepard, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

The Notebook

as Frank Calhoun

Black Hawk Down

as MG William F. Garrison

Safe House

as Harlan Whitford

Brothers

as Hank Cahill

Mud

as Tom

Swordfish

as Senator Reisman

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

as Frank James

Killing Them Softly

as Dillon

Out of the Furnace

as Gerald 'Red' Baze

Midnight Special

as Calvin Meyer