Sam Shepard

LOS ANGELES — Despite dozens of blatantly personal plays to his name, movie stardom and the spotlight of celebrity and acclaim, Sam Shepard remained throughout his life an inscrutable figure, an American myth.

Shepard, who died Thursday at age 73, was in some ways the quintessential American: full of restlessness, contradictions, and mysteries — and as handsome as they come.

He wrote and lived like life was its own jazz composition — skipping from a post-war California avocado ranch to the experimental East Village theater scene of the 1960s, then to London and Hollywood and back again. He wrote a play with Patti Smith and a song with Bob Dylan, and was the drummer for the “amphetamine rock band” The Holy Modal Rounders. His screenplays include Wim Wenders’ western wander poem “Paris, Texas” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Death Valley shocker “Zabriskie Point.” He also fathered three children, had a passionate 30-year relationship with movie star Jessica Lange, picked up a Pulitzer Prize for playwriting and an Academy Award nomination for acting along the way — and those are just a few of the highlights.

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII in Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1943, Shepard was both ardently of his time, innovating new methods of storytelling to impact an anxious era, and also evocative of decades past — forever haunted by the men of his father’s generation of World War II vets who he described as “devastated in some basic way.”

Shepard spent his teen years generally apathetic toward school and looking for a way out of the banality of the post-war suburb. In his short stint in college in Walnut, Calif., he was exposed to the absurdist stylings of Samuel Beckett and decided to leave.

He had a difficult relationship with his father, who he called “a dedicated alcoholic” with a “real short fuse.” Although wary of picking at his own traumas, Shepard explored this and other themes in his “Family Trilogy” of plays including “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West.”

Shepard saw the absurdities in his own life too. In April 1979, Shepard was informed that he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child” on the same day it closed.

Shepard as movie star and celebrity was perhaps the designation that embarrassed him most.

He made his film debut in Terrence Malick’s 1978 dreamy period piece “Days of Heaven,” as a wealthy, isolated farmer and romantic foe to Richard Gere. He’d go on to embody classic masculinity as Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff,” for which he’d score an Oscar nomination, and charm Lange in the Frances Farmer biopic “Frances” and then Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom.”

He was memorable as the general in “Black Hawk Down,” as a hot-headed patriarch in the series “Bloodline,” and as Ryan Gosling’s country father in “The Notebook.”