One of the best scenes from The Right Stuff is when Sam Shepard playing Chuck Yeager appears like a phoenix when the viewer thinks he perished in a crash. Today we lost Sam Shepard to complications from ALS.
If you weren’t aware, Sam Shepard was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and I read his plays like Fool for Love and Buried Child before I ever saw him act. I loved the characters in his plays because they were average, but philosophical, feeling things I could understand. And, when I saw him act, I crushed on him. Tall, boyishly handsome, smart, and a writer who could act, a total package; I thought he was a renaissance man.
And when I had the opportunity to quote from one of his plays in a piece of flash fiction I wrote here a few months back, you can bet that I did. As I wrote about the cowboy actor, I had an image in my mind of what he would look like.
Rest in peace, Sam Shepard.
“I hate endings. Just detest them.”
Sam Shepard
(1943-2017)
I loved him, too. Recently saw him in the romantic comedy, Baby Boom with Diane Keaton. He definitely had the right stuff.
Yep. Did you ever see The Right Stuff? Some of the scenes with him and Barbara Hershey were sizzling even though there wasn’t any sex.