LOS ANGELES —
Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes Scholar with a deft writing style and rugged charisma who became a country music superstar and sought-after Hollywood actor, has died.
Kristofferson died Saturday at his home in Maui, Hawaii, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88 years old.
The artist died peacefully, surrounded by his family, McFarland added. The cause of death was not provided.
Starting in the 1960s, the musician from Brownsville, Texas, wrote country music and rock ‘n’ roll classics such as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “ For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but his compositions became better known in the performances of others, whether it was Ray Price singing “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Along with Ellen Burstyn, Kristofferson starred in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” in 1974; He starred opposite Barbra Streisand in “A Star is Born” in 1976, and starred opposite Wesley Snipes in Marvel’s “Blade” in 1998.
Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake by heart, wove intricate folk lyrics about loneliness and tender romances into popular country music. With his long hair, bell-bottoms, and Bob Dylan-influenced counterculture songs, he represented a new generation of country songwriters, alongside colleagues such as Willie Nelson, John Prine, and Tom T. Hall.
“There is no better living songwriter than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a BMI awards ceremony for Kristofferson in November 2009. “Everything he writes is a benchmark and we are all going to have to live with it.” .
Kristofferson retired from acting and recording in 2021, and made only occasional guest appearances on stage, including a performance with Roseanne Cash at Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. two sang “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” a Kristofferson hit that Nelson—one of the great interpreters of his work—sang many times live.
Nelson and Kristofferson would join forces with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to create the country supergroup “The Highwaymen” beginning in the mid-1980s.
Kristofferson was an amateur boxer, rugby star and college football player; earned a master’s degree in English from Merton College, University of Oxford, England; and flew helicopters with the rank of captain in the US Army, but turned down a teaching position at the Military Academy at West Point, New York, to devote himself to songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the music industry, he was a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966, when Dylan recorded songs for the landmark double album “Blonde on Blonde.”
At times, Kristofferson’s legend was a little above reality. Cash liked to tell a story—mostly exaggerated—of how Kristofferson landed by helicopter in Cash’s yard to deliver a tape of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” with a beer in one hand. In interviews he gave over the years, Kristofferson said, with all due respect to Cash, that although a helicopter did land in Cash’s yard, he wasn’t even home at the time, that the demo tape was a song that no one ever recorded on a record, and that he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter with a beer in his hand.
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2006, he said he might not have had a career without Cash.
“Shaking his hand backstage at the Grand Ole Opry when I was still in the Army was the moment I decided I would come back,” Kristofferson said. “It was electrifying. He kind of took me under his wing before I recorded any of my songs. He recorded my first album, which was album of the year. “He put me on stage for the first time.”
One of his most recorded songs, “Me and Bobby McGee,” was written based on a recommendation from Monument Records founder Fred Foster. He had the title of a song in his head called “Me and Bobby McKee,” in honor of a secretary in his building. Kristofferson said in an interview in “Performing Songwriter” magazine that he was inspired to write the lyrics about a man and a woman traveling together after watching Federico Fellini’s film “La Strada.”
Joplin, who had a close relationship with Kristofferson, altered the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and recorded her version just days before he died of a drug overdose in 1970. Joplin’s recording reached No. 1 on the charts. popularity charts posthumously.
Among the hits Kristofferson recorded were “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I’d Like to Sing,” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”
In 1973 he married composer Rita Coolidge and they had a successful career in a duet with which they won two Grammy Awards. They divorced in 1980.
In the field of acting, Kristofferson’s first role was in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” in 1971.
He liked westerns, and used his deep voice to play stoic, attractive men. He played the irresistibly attractive man to Burstyn in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and a tragic rock star in an unstable relationship with Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” a role Bradley Cooper played in the new 2018 version.
___
AP journalist Hillel Italie contributed to this report.
