Photo: Soerfm / CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Sam Shepard is, to me, the gold standard of the artist who refused to choose a single lane. Fifty-eight plays, a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child, a record ten Obie Awards — that alone secures his place in American letters — yet he also spent decades as a magnetic screen actor, all weathered stillness and quiet authority. Nobody wrote the fractures of the American family with more unsparing honesty. What moves me is that he treated writing and acting not as competing careers but as two dialects of the same language. He died in 2017, but his plays remain restlessly alive on stages everywhere.
Overview
Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was an American playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, author and musician whose career spanned half a century. He wrote 58 plays and several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. His accolades include the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (for his play Buried Child), the Drama Desk Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award, and a record 10 Obie Awards.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Sam Shepard
- Name (Japanese)
- サム・シェパード
- Reading
- さむ・しぇぱーど
- Born
- November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Scorpio / Goat
- Origin
- Fort Sheridan, Illinois, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- actor / film director / screenwriter / dramaturge / playwright
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Duarte High School
- University
- Mt. San Antonio College
Awards & achievements
- 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship
- 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Obie Award
- New York Drama Critics Award
- 1971 Guggenheim Fellowship
- PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award
- star on Playwrights' Sidewalk
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Actor — see all → · Film director — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-11
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.