Sam+Shepard



__**Sam Shepard**__

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, he worked on a ranch as a teenager. His father, Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., was a teacher and farmer who served in the United States Army Air Forces as a bomber pilot during World War II. His mother, Jane Elaine (née Schook), was a teacher and a native of Chicago, Illinois. After high school Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a travelling theater group. He was also a drummer for the eccentric late-1960s rock band The Holy Modal Rounders, featured in the movie Easy Rider (1969). Career Shepard became involved in New York City's Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, beginning at the age of nineteen. Although his plays were staged at several Off-Off-Broadway venues, he was most closely connected with Theatre Genesis, housed at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan's East Village. He acted occasionally in those days, but his interests were almost strictly confined to writing, up until the late 1970s. Most of his writing was for the stage, but he had early screen-writing credits for Me and My Brother (1968) and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970). His early science-fiction play, The Unseen Hand, influenced Richard O'Brien's stage musical Rocky Horror Show. After three years of living in England, in 1976 Shepard relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in California and was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco where many of his works received their premier productions. Notable work includes Buried Child (1978), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), True West (1980) and A Lie of the Mind (1985). He also continued with his collaboration with Bob Dylan that started with the surrealist film Renaldo and Clara (1978) and co-wrote with Dylan an epic, 11-minute song entitled "Brownsville Girl", included on Dylan's Knocked Out Loaded (1986) album and later compilations. Shepard began his acting career in earnest when he was cast as the handsome land baron in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. This led to other important films and roles, most notably his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983), earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. By 1986, one of his plays, Fool for Love, was being made into a film directed by Robert Altman; his play A Lie of the Mind was Off-Broadway with an all-star cast including Harvey Keitel and Geraldine Page; he was living with Jessica Lange; and he was working steadily as a film actor—all of which put him on the cover of Newsweek magazine. Throughout the years, Shepard has done a considerable amount of teaching on writing plays and other aspects of theatre. His classes and seminars have occurred at various theatre workshops, festivals, and universities. During the 1970s he served a stint as a Regents Professor at the University of California, Davis. Shepard was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. In 2000, Shepard decided to repay a debt of gratitude to the Magic Theatre by staging his play The Late Henry Moss as a benefit in San Francisco. The cast included Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, and Cheech Marin. The limited, three-month run was sold out. In 2001, Shepard had a notable role of General William F. Garrison in the box office hit and cult classic movie Black Hawk Down. Although he was cast in a supporting role, it reinvigorated interest in Shepard among the public and critics alike. He performed Spalding Gray's final monologue Life Interrupted for its audio release through Macmillan Audio in 2006. In 2007, Shepard was featured playing banjo on Patti Smith's cover of Nirvana's song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", on her album Twelve. Although many artists have had an influence on Shepard's work, one of the most significant has been actor-director Joseph Chaikin, a veteran of the Living Theatre and founder of a group called the Open Theatre. The two have often worked together on various projects, and Shepard acknowledges that Chaikin has been a valuable mentor. A revival of A Lie of the Mind in New Yorkwas staged at the same time as his 2010 play, Ages of the Moon, also opened there. Reflecting on the two plays, Shephard said that the older, longer play feels to him "awkward ...[,all of the characters are in a fractured place, broken into pieces, and the pieces don’t really fit together," while the newer play "is like a Porsche. ... It’s sleek, it does exactly what you want it to do, and it can speed up but also shows off great brakes."The revival and new play also coincided with the publication of the collection Day out of Days: Stories (book title echoing a film-making term), also by Shepard. The book includes "short stories, poems and narrative sketches ... that developed from dozens of leather-bound notebooks [Shepard] has carried with him over the years. Directing At the beginning of his playwriting career, Shepard did not direct his own plays. His earliest plays were directed by a number of different directors but most frequently by Ralph Cook, the founder of Theatre Genesis. Later, while living at the Flying Y Ranch in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco, Shepard formed a successful playwright-director relationship with Robert Woodruff, who directed the premiere of Buried Child (1982), among other plays. During the 1970s, though, Shepard decided that his vision of his plays required that he should direct them himself. He has since directed many of his own plays, but with a few rare exceptions, he has not directed plays by other playwrights. He has also directed two films but apparently does not see film direction as a major interest.
 * __Personal Life and Career__**


 * __List of Plays__**
 * 1964 Cowboys
 * 1964 The Rock Garden
 * 1965 Chicago
 * 1965 Icarus's Mother
 * 1965 4-H Club
 * 1966 Red Cross
 * 1967 La Turista
 * 1967 Cowboys #2
 * 1967 Forensic & the Navigators
 * 1969 The Unseen Hand
 * 1969 Oh! Calcutta! (contributed sketches)
 * 1970 The Holy Ghostly
 * 1970 Operation Sidewinder


 * 1971 Mad Dog Blues
 * 1971 Back Bog Beast Bait
 * 1971 Cowboy Mouth (with Patti Smith)
 * 1972 The Tooth of Crime
 * 1974 Geography of a Horse Dreamer
 * 1975 Action
 * 1976 Suicide in B Flat
 * 1976 Angel City
 * 1977 Inacoma
 * 1978 Buried Child
 * 1978 Curse of the Starving Class
 * 1978 Tongues (with Joseph Chaikin)
 * 1980 True West


 * 1981 Savage Love (with Joseph Chaikin)
 * 1983 Fool for Love
 * 1985 A Lie of the Mind
 * 1987 A Short Life of Trouble
 * 1991 States of Shock
 * 1993 Simpatico
 * 1994 Safe Passage
 * 1998 Eyes for Consuela
 * 2000 The Late Henry Moss
 * 2004 The Notebook (play)
 * 2004 The God of Hell
 * 2007 Kicking a Dead Horse
 * 2009 Ages of the Moon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Shepard http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001731/ http://www.sam-shepard.com/aboutsam.html
 * __Links__**