Died at 82
male
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.
In 1990 and 1991, studio executives were scrambling to come up with a project to match the unmitigated success of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie. Many strange and bizarre comic based movies were released throughout the 90s coming from this scramble: The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy, The Shadow, The Crow, these were the comic book movies that crawled so the genre could later thrive. In another time, this competitive scramble gave us a Watchmen movie more than a decade early. A 3 hour cult masterpiece, brought to us by the twisted, creative genius of Terry Gilliam.
