Sam Shepard: Playwright at Center Stage (Appreciation)

Playwrights don’t generally become household names outside of Broadway circles, but Shepard was becoming well known to moviegoers with striking acting turns in films like Terence Malick’s 1979 “Days of Heaven” and the biopic “Frances” (where he met Lange), not to mention his Oscar-nominated performance as pilot Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff.”

Shepard had become enough of a selling point as an actor — carrying with him a craggy, no-nonsense brand of laconic American toughness — that he was cast in the lead role of Robert Altman’s screen adaptation of “Fool for Love.”

[...] the ever-snotty Spy magazine couldn’t resist taking a dig at Shepard’s two branches of fame; a writer there once sniffed that Shepard thought he was Gary Cooper crossed with Eugene O’Neill when he was really a mix of Randolph Scott and Zane Grey.

Writer, actor, musician (he had an affair with Patti Smith in the early 1970s and later played banjo on her cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), Shepard was a talented hyphenate who kept creating all the way up to his passing this weekend after a bout with ALS.