Sam Shepard
Actor
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.
As Director
Filmography
The Notebook
as Frank Calhoun 2004
Black Hawk Down
as MG William F. Garrison 2001
Brothers
as Hank Cahill 2009
Safe House
as Harlan Whitford 2012
Mud
as Tom 2013
Swordfish
as Senator Reisman 2001
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
as Frank James 2007
Killing Them Softly
as Dillon 2012
Out of the Furnace
as Gerald 'Red' Baze 2013
Midnight Special
as Calvin Meyer 2016
The Pelican Brief
as Thomas Callahan 1993
August: Osage County
as Beverly Weston 2013
Charlotte's Web
as Narrator (voice) 2006
The Pledge
as Eric Pollack 2001
Bandidas
as Bill Buck 2006
Stealth
as George Cummings 2005
Days of Heaven
as The Farmer 1978