“Movie actor and country music legend Kris Kristofferson passed away in Hollywood. Along with Barbara Streisand, the Rhodes scholar with a fine writing style and gruff personality, a Golden Globe winner for the 1976 film A Star became a country music sensation and A-list Hollywood actor who earned four Grammys including a lifetime achievement award in 2014. Family spokesman Ebie McFarland emailed saying he passed on Saturday at his Maui, Hawaii residence. His age was 88. McFarland claimed Kristofferson passed away quietly surrounded by his family. There was no indication of causation. Three years after he left the entertainment industry, his family is remembering him in an emotional message uploaded on Instagram. It said: “We convey the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, died away peacefully on Saturday, September 28 at home with sorrowful hearts. For our time with him, each of us is quite privileged. Thank you for loving him all these many years; remember he is beaming down at us all when you see a rainbow.” Signed from the “Family of Kris Kristofferson,” the statement included: “The family asks for privacy during this time.”
Kris’s wife Lisa, his eight children, and seven grandchildren survive him. Superstar Barbra Streisand, who starred beside him in the 1976 “A Star Is Born,” also recalled him. She said in an Instagram post: “I knew he was unique the first time I saw Kris live at the Troubadour club in L.A. Barefoot and strumming his guitar, he seemed ideal for a script I was working on, which finally became ‘A Star Is Born’. In the film, Kris and I performed the song I had created for the major love theme—evergreen. “I invited Kris to perform our other ‘A Star Is Born duet,’ ‘Lost Inside Of You,’ on-stage at my most recent concert at London’s Hyde Park. The audience lavished him with cheers; he was as delightful as ever. Seeing him get the respect and love he so richly earned made one happy. My thoughts turn to Lisa, Kris’s wife, who I know helped him in every manner imaginable.” Another person who remembers him was fellow country artist Dolly Parton, who throughout the years had countless duets with Kristofferson.
Dolly said on social media, “What a big loss. Such a wonderful writer. What a terrific actor you are. What wonderful friend you have. I shall love you, Dolly always.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the native of Brownsville, Texas penned such venerable classics include Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, Help Me Make it Through the Night, For the Good Times and Me and Bobby McGee. Although Kristofferson sang solo, many of his songs—Ray Price crooning for the Good Times or Janis Joplin belting out Me and Bobby McGee—were most remembered as sung by others. Along with Streisand in A Star Is Born, he featured opposite Ellen Burstyn in filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s 1974 picture Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and teamed with Wesley Snipes on Marvel’s Blade in 1998. Kristofferson was admitted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. “Kris Kristofferson believed creativity is God-given, and those who ignore such a gift are doomed to unhappiness,” said Kyle Young, the chief executive for the Country Music Hall of Fame. His preaching was that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul; his work gave voice not just to his but also to ours. He leaves a startling legacy. From memory, Kristofferson could sing William Blake, then spun complex folk music notes about gentle love and loneliness into popular country music. Along with such friends as Willie Nelson, John Prine, and Tom T Hall, he embodied a new generation of country songwriters with his long hair and bell-bottomed pants and counterculture tunes inspired by Bob Dylan. “There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson remarked at a November 2009 BMI award presentation. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
Originally a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, he turned down an assignment to teach at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, in order to pursue songwriting in Nashville after earning a master’s degree in English from Merton College, the University of Oxford in England. Desperate to enter the business, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row facility in 1966 while Dylan recorded recordings for the iconic Blonde on Blonde double album. Kristofferson’s mystique occasionally seemed more expansive than reality. Mostly exaggerating his tale of how former US Army pilot Kristofferson landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to provide him with a tape of Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down with a drink in one hand, Johnny Cash loved to relate. Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson stated with all respect to Cash, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the Man in Black wasn’t even home at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever actually cut and he definitely couldn’t fly a helicopter carrying a beer. According to a 2006 interview, he might not have had a career free from Cash.”Shaking his hand when I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I’d decided I’d come back,” Kristofferson said. “It felt electric. Before he chopped any of my songs, he kind of took me under his wing. He sliced my first record of the year. On my first visit, he put me on stage. Written on a recommendation from Monument Records founder Fred Foster, Me and Bobby McGee is among his most well-known tunes. Inspired by a female secretary in his building, Foster developed a song title in his mind called Me and Bobby McKee. Inspired to create the lyrics about a man and lady on the road together after seeing the Frederico Fellini film, La Strada, Kristofferson revealed in an interview in the magazine, Performing Songwriter. Close friend Joplin altered the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a male and cut her version just days before her death in 1970 from a heroin overdose. For Joplin, the tape turned into a postmortem No. 1 smash. Among the hits Kristofferson made were Watch Closely Now, Desperados, Why Me, Loving Her Was Easier ( Than Anything I’ll Ever Do), Jesus Was a Capricorn; A Song I’d Like to Sing; and Waiting for a Train. He wed fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge in 1973, and together they had a great duet career, earning two Grammy awards. 1980 saw them file for divorce. He retired from singing and recording in 2021, only sporadically making stage appearances, including a duet with Roseanne Cash at Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. One of the finest interpreters of Kristofferson’s material, Nelson produced the most well-known rendition of the two songs they created. Beginning in the middle-1980s, Nelson and Kristofferson would team with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to form the country ensemble “The Highwaymen.” Another turning event in his career as a musician was the founding of the Highwaymen including Nelson, Cash and Jennings. “I came in it as a fan of all of them, so I think I was different from the other guys in that,” Kristofferson remarked in 2005. ” When I was still in the Army, I respected them. Since they took the music seriously, I considered them as great idols when I visited Nashville. To be friends with them and to work side by side was just a bit unreal, not only noted by them, like seeing your face on Mount Rushmore. Before the vocalists returned to their respective careers, the quartet released just three albums between 1985 and 1995. Cash passed away one year later and Jennings passed away in 2002. Kristofferson remarked in 2005 that although there was some discussion of reuniting the group with other musicians like George Jones or Hank Williams Jr., it wouldn’t have been the same.
“When I look back now – I know I hear Willie say it was the best time of his life,” Kristofferson remarked in 2005. “I wish I knew how brief the time would be, for me. Though it was several years, it felt as though the blink of an eye. I wish I would have savoured every minute.
Sometimes his sharp-tongued political songs sour his appeal, particularly in the late 1980s. Although his 1989 album, “Third World Warrior” concentrated on Central America and what American policies had produced there, critics and fans were not enthralled with the blatantly political songs.
In a 1995 interview, he said he recalled a woman complaining about one of the songs starting with slaughtering babies under the pretext of freedom. “And I responded, Well, what made you furious – the fact that I was stating it or the fact that we’re doing it? I was informing them what was happening, so they were getting enraged at me.”
He joined the Army in the 1960s as expected of him, the son of an Air Force General. “I was in ROTC in college, and it was just taken for granted in my family that I would serve,” he stated in a 2006 interview. ” From my background and the generation I came up in, honor and serving your nation were just taken for granted. Later on, when you start to wonder about some of the activities under your name, it was quite hurtful.
Hollywood might have rescued his musical career. Even though he couldn’t afford to travel with a full band, his movie and television appearances nonetheless exposed him. First acting in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie,” 1971, Kristofferson was
He loved Westerns and would play austere, elegant leading men using his gravelly voice. Bradley Cooper’s performance in the 2018 version reflects Burstyn’s toughly beautiful love interest in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and his tragic rock star in a turbulent romance with Streisand in A Star Is Born.
He was the youthful title outlaw in director Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a truck driver for the same filmmaker in 1978’s Convoy, and a crooked sheriff in director John Sayles’ 1996 Lone Star. He also starred in Heaven’s Gate, a 1980 Western running tens of millions of dollars over budget, among Hollywood’s biggest financial failures.
And he portrayed the tutor of Snipes’ vampire hunter in Blade, in a rare cameo in a superhero film. He related how he landed his first acting jobs in Los Angeles.
“It just happened that my first professional gig was at the Troubadour in L.A. opening for Linda Rondstadt,” Kristofferson stated. “Robert Hilburn ( Los Angeles Times music critic) wrote a great review and the concert was held over for a week,” Kristofferson added. “I started receiving film offers with little experience as a lot of movie people started visiting. Of course, I had never performed either.
