NEW YORK CITY, July 31, 2017 (Gephardt Daily) — Playwright and actor Sam Shepard has died at age 73.
According to The New York Times, Shepard died at his home in Kentucky following a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.
Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize winning writer (for “Buried Child,” 1979) and Oscar nominated actor (for playing Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff.”) He wrote 44 plays, and New York Magazine once described him as “the greatest American playwright of his generation.”
Shepard’s plays are known for their bleak, poetic, often surrealist elements, black humor and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society, according to Wikipedia.
Shepard’s plays included: “Cowboys” (1964), “Chicago” (1965), “La Turista” (1967), “Oh! Calcutta!” (contribute sketches), “Cowboy Mouth” (1971, with Patti Smith,” “Suicide in B Flat” (1976); “True West” (1983), “The God of Hell” (2004), “Kicking a Dead Horse” (2007), and “A Particle of Dread” (Oedipus variations).
Shepard is survived by Jesse Mojo Shepard, his son with former wife O-Lane Jones, and by Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker Shepard, his children from a 30-year-relationship with actress Jessica Lange, which ended in 2009.
