"When you hit a wall of your own imagined limitations," Sam Shepard once wrote about the act of creation, "just kick it in." That's certainly what he did, working as an accomplished playwright, director and screenwriter. Shepard died on Thursday at the age of 73.
Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Illinois in 1943, Shepard worked on a ranch on a teen and it wasn't until he discovered Samuel Beckett's work, jazz and abstract expressionism at college that he decided to pursue life on and around the stage. He dropped out to join a touring theatre repertory company and became one of the leading lights in the theatrical scene that sprang to life in New York in the early 1960s. As well as acting, he began writing, crafting surreal plays and eventually segueing to near-realism. A big success came in 1979, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child.
On screen, he broke out in Terrence Malick's Days Of Heaven, and was Oscar nominated for his work in The Right Stuff. Other notable movies included Black Hawk Down, Crimes Of The Heart, Steel Magnolias, Mud, and Paris, Texas, which he wrote. On TV, he most recently appeared in Netflix's Bloodline.
Shepard is survived by his children, Jesse, Hannah, and Walker Shepard, and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.