The lion in winter, the playwright Sam Shepard

A man of many talents

Sam Shepard with his down home honesty and American good looks; seemed, like fellow actor Robert Redford to personify the Marlboro Man Mythic. But unlike Redford, Shepard smoked, heavily and like his father, destroyed his life and relationship with his alcoholism.

Writing, booze and women

His real name was Samuel Shepard Rogers IV. He was born at Fort Sheridan, Illinois on November 5, 1943 because his father was serving in the Army Air Corp during World War II. He is a western bucket highlighting his self-sufficiency with a Moon handle, a not uncommon combination for artists. His teeters on the fifth-sixth house cusp. His Mercury is in the third house square the Moon to the right and square Pluto on the left but the key it is mutually receptive to Mars in the tenth. Though many know of his roles in movies, Shepard wrote 58 plays and a few books.

The chart shows the Part of Fortune via the ancient formula while the post uses the modern.

He wrote of dysfunctional families and most thought this was the one he grew up in, not realizing his Part of Fortune 09 Sagittarius 17 opposite Uranus at the Midheaven in Gemini it was also a mask for his own. In a new biography by Robert Dowling titled “Coyote the Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard” we learn he was zonked out at his wedding to a pregnant nineteen year old O-Lan Jones on LSD.

Later, much later in life, Shepard recollected “I’ve only begun to realize how I’ve ruined every relationship with women in exactly the same pattern and that booze is the centerfield.” It would seem he was finally accepting his Chiron in the first house. Appropriately though, all the women he met through his writing or acting fit into his yod sextile of Saturn to Jupiter with the apex at 25 Capricorn where lies asteroid Juno, showing how they were all very efficient on picking up the pieces he left behind and moving on.

On July 27, 2017 Sam Shepard reposed on his farm in Midway, Kentucky 62 miles away from the great August 21 eclipse maximum viewpoint that occurred four weeks later. HIs progressed chart shows his Sun was in hayz, a debilitating situation. Nonetheless there is a stellium in Leo at the top of the chart, apropos as despite being 73 and ill he was still getting offers to appear in plays.

He died of complications of ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a highly progressive incurable neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.  There are no laboratory tests for the disease just an EMG and NCV nerve test.  The disease is always fatal and usually hereditary.

Jessica P. Lange

Below is his long time partner Jessica Lange. I took the public chart and then adjusted it local mean time thus getting the ascent of 29 Cancer, though I think 17 Cancer would be better. Nevertheless, 29 Cancer has the symbol of “Clouds above the mountaintop . This symbol suggests some whose aspiration rises ever anew in the hearts of those who are open to it as if in a mystical meeting of heaven and earth or the blending of creativity and mystical receptiveness.” from the Hyperion Symbols.

Lange has a grand trine in air. She is a splay with no oppositions in her chart.

The most notable thing in her chart is her square from Saturn to Alpha Centauri (more formally called Rigel Kentaurus) showing her ability to find men with better connections than herself and aligning with them. Her Arabian Parts, not shown highlights that same Saturn square to the Part of Husbands; Jessica never married either of the fathers of her children, Mikhail Baryshnikov nor Shepard but her Ascendant conjunct Part of Adultery could be the reason. She has mentioned both men cheated on her. That would affects one’s belief in the permanency of marital ties. You can do the synastry chart yourselves; all things said, it is rather romantic.