Sam Shepard, actor, playwright and director, has died at the age of 73.
He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and died with family by his side on July 27.
READ MORE: June Foray, voice actor of Tweety Bird’s owner and more, dies at 99
A family spokesperson said Monday that Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Actor Ethan Hawke, who co-starred with Shepard in Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) and Hamlet (2000), remembered Shepard in a statement: “He was a poet of the first order. I’ve acted in many of his plays and directed A Lie of the Mind. He played my father twice on film. Some days he could be irascible. At other times he could be profoundly wise and kind. He was the writer any serious American actor of my generation cut their teeth on. It is a gross understatement to say, he will be missed.”
After news of his passing spread, condolences began pouring in on Twitter.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXNz93XjuQE/
Shepard wrote more than 40 plays and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child in 1979.
“I always felt like playwriting was the thread through all of it,” Shepard said in 2011. “Theatre really when you think about it contains everything. It can contain film. Film can’t contain theatre. Music. Dance. Painting. Acting. It’s the whole deal. And it’s the most ancient. It goes back to the Druids. It was way pre-Christ. It’s the form that I feel most at home in, because of that, because of its ability to usurp everything.”
READ MORE: Jeanne Moreau, award-winning French actress, dies at 89
He went on to be Oscar-nominated for his role in the 1983 film The Right Stuff and starred in many other films including Black Hawk Down and Pelican Brief.
Shepard recently starred in the first season of the Netflix series Bloodline as the patriarch of a prominent Florida Keys family who tries to keep a web of secrets from destroying their lives.
Shepard is survived by his children, Jesse, Hannah and Walker Shepard and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.
—With files from The Associated Press
Comments