One minute a drummer in a rock 'n' roll band, the next minute contributing to the screenplay of Michelangelo Antonioni's interesting, if poorly received, "Zabriskie Point" (1970), Shepard would not become widely recognized until he started appearing in movies like "The Right Stuff" (1983) and "Country" (1984). Ironically, the beginning of his most creative period as a playwright coincided with his entry into film acting. At about the same time as his first significant role in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" (1978), the first two of a series of plays about families tearing themselves apart were debuting Off-Broadway, unlocking a Pandora's Box of patricide, infanticide, fratricide and incest. Both "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Buried Child" would add to his OBIE collection, while the latter earned him the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He also began his collaboration with actor-writer-director Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theater, writing with Chaikin and composing with Skip LaPlante and Harry Mann first "Tongues" and then "Savage/Love" (both 1979).

Tall and lanky, Shepard has parlayed his weathered good looks into movie stardom playing primarily Western characters that represent a dichotomy for the artist. His unflappable, unerring screen persona epitomized by his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff" would not seem to hint at the tormented purveyor of the continuing dysfunctional saga represented by "True West" (1980) and "Fool For Love" (1983), but as he has said himself, "You know contradiction is the stuff of life." Shepard scripted Wim Wenders' atmospheric American odyssey "Paris, Texas" (1984), which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes, as well as Robert Altman's film adaptation of "Fool for Love" (1985), in which he also starred as Eddy, before making his directorial debut with the elliptical drama "Far North" (1988), which he also wrote. He returned behind the camera for the metaphysical Western "Silent Tongue" (1992), which featured Alan Bates and the late River Phoenix, providing percussion in addition to writing its screenplay.

Shepard reteamed with Chaikin for "When the World Was Green" (1996), a play commissioned for the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta and reprised for the Signature Theater Company's 1996-97 season devoted to his work. Though the playwright declared the retrospective a bust ("The plays were so individual that as a season they didn't make any sense, and the productions just weren't up to scratch in a lot of cases"), the offerings represented a cross-section of his work from old to new, demonstrating at their best just how difficult it is to confine him to any one category. Chaikin's delightful restaging of "Chicago" displayed the director's gift for weightless comedy and served as counterpoint to all the excessively naturalistic productions that fail to discover the underlying mysticism or fully realize the humor that exists in Shepard's scripts. After more than 30 years in the theater, he received his first exposure on Broadway with the Gary Sinise-directed revival of "Buried Child" (1996) and continues to act in movies, like the TV biopic "Dash and Lily" (A&E, 1999) and "Snow Falling on Cedars" (1999), to finance his passion for writing, pursuing his fascination with identity, both his and that of the culture as a whole.