Kris Kristofferson, Country Music Legend and ‘A Star Is Born’ Leading Man, Dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, who attained success as both a groundbreaking country music singer-songwriter and a Hollywood film and TV star, died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii. No cause of death was given, but he was described as passing away peacefully while surrounded by family. He was 88.

Said his family in a statement, “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, Sept. 28 at home. We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.” The statement was offered on behalf of Kristofferson’s wife, Lisa; his eight children, Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake; and his seven grandchildren.

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Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, “Kris Kristofferson believed to his core that creativity is God-given, and that those who ignore or deflect such a holy gift are doomed to failure and unhappiness. He preached that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul, and then he created a body of work that gave voice not only to his soul but to ours. Kris’s heroes included the prize fighter Muhammad Ali, the great poet William Blake, and the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare,’ Hank Williams. He lived his life in a way that honored and exemplified the values of each of those men, and he leaves a righteous, courageous and resounding legacy that rings with theirs.”

Kristofferson had already spent several modestly successful years in Music City’s song mills by the time he broke through as the author of such No. 1 country hits as “For the Good Times” (Ray Price, 1970), “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (Johnny Cash, 1970) and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Sammi Smith, 1971). His song “Me and Bobby McGee” became a posthumous No. 1 pop hit for his former paramour Janis Joplin in 1971.

His first four albums for Monument Records, which showcased his rough, unmannered singing and poetically crafted, proto-outlaw country songs, all reached the country top 10, and 1972’s “Jesus Was a Capricorn,” which contained his No. 1 country hit “Why Me,” topped the country LP chart. He won three Grammys: for best country song (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and a pair of duets with Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973-80.

Bill C. Malone noted in “Country Music, U.S.A.,” the standard history of the genre, “Kristofferson’s lyrics spoke often of loneliness, alienation and pain, but they also celebrated freedom and honest relationships, and in intimate, sensuous language that had been rare to country music.”

Kristofferson could be the first to knock his own voice. “I don’t think I’m that good a singer,” he said in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. “I can’t think of a song that I’ve written that I don’t like the way somebody else sings it better.” But with many of his signature songs, fans would not have wanted them channeled through any other voice, least of all one that smoothed out their raw sentiments.

The musician’s lean good looks and laid-back persona made him a natural for pictures. He made his first mark on screen in Bill L. Norton’s 1972 feature “Cisco Pike,” in which he played the titular character, an L.A. musician and drug dealer under the thumb of a corrupt narcotics cop (Gene Hackman); the feature also employed several Kristofferson songs on its soundtrack.

Through the ‘70s, he enjoyed a rising movie profile, playing the romantic lead opposite Susan Anspach in Paul Mazursky’s “Blume in Love” (1973) and Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974). In 1977, co-billed with Barbra Streisand, he won a Golden Globe Award as a dissolute rock star in the third version of “A Star is Born.”

However, he hit hard bumps in Hollywood in a couple of legendarily troubled productions. He co-starred with James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah’s ambitious 1973 Western “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” appearing as the notorious outlaw; the film became a notorious cause célebre after it was taken out of the director’s hands and recut by MGM. (Kristofferson went on to star in Peckinpah’s “Convoy” (1978), based on C.W. McCall’s CB radio-themed hit; while the film made money, the actor’s notices were dismal.)

Kristofferson’s acting career never completely recovered after he starred in Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western epic “Heaven’s Gate.” Dogged by pre-release chatter about cost overruns and Cimino’s on-set perfectionism, the film received devastating reviews, and was almost immediately withdrawn from release and drastically re-edited; United Artists – which was sold to MGM by Transamerica in the wake of the debacle — wrote off the picture’s entire $44 million cost a week after its premiere. Its title became virtually synonymous with Tinseltown excess and hubris.

In the face of withering criticism, Kristofferson always maintained a staunch defense of “Heaven’s Gate,” which later gained critical respect. In a 2012 video interview included in the Criterion Collection’s home video release of the film, he said, “Both Michael and his movie deserved better… [it] deserved being treated like a work of art, and not as some failed economic venture.”

During the ‘80s, he slowly regained his career footing. With Willie Nelson – who recorded a bestselling album of Kristofferson’s songs in 1979 – he co-starred in Alan Rudolph’s 1984 feature “Songwriter”; their collaborative song score received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1985, Kristofferson, Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings convened for the album “Highwayman,” a No. 1 country album that introduced the outlaw country supergroup. Ultimately known as the Highwaymen, the quartet issued two more popular albums in 1990 and 1995.

His film career continued apace, albeit in smaller roles; he ultimately tallied more than 100 movie and TV acting appearances. In 1996, he garnered strong reviews as a sadistic Texas lawman in John Sayles’ “Lone Star.” In 1998, he made the first of three appearances as vampire hunter Abraham Whistler opposite Wesley Snipes in the popular comic book franchise “Blade.”

After parting ways with Monument in the early ‘80s, Kristofferson recorded solo only sporadically. He nonetheless received strong reviews for three poignant and personal latter-day albums – “A Moment of Forever” (1995), “This Old Road” (2006) and “Closer to the Bone” (2009) – nakedly produced by Don Was. He issued 2013’s “Feeling Mortal” on his own KK Records imprint.

A 2004 inductee in the Country Music Hall of Fame, Kristofferson received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in 2015.

At the time of the latter honor, his contemporary and friend Rodney Crowell wrote that Kristofferson had created “a narrative style that introduced intelligence, humor, emotional eloquence, spiritual longing, male vulnerability and a devilish sensuality – indeed, a form of eroticism – to country music.”

He was born June 2, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas. His father was a career Army Air Corps and Air Force officer, and his family moved frequently. He attended high school in San Mateo, Calif., where he proved both a strong student and a gifted athlete. He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from Pomona College and attended Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar.

While in the U.K., Kristofferson cut his first records as Kris Carson. However, on returning to the U.S., he joined the army under pressure from his family. He ultimately attained the rank of captain, and was able to pilot a helicopter. However, on the eve of beginning an assignment to teach English at West Point, he left the army, and in 1965 he moved to Nashville to pursue music full-time. His family promptly cut ties with him.

Kristofferson scuffled in Music City for four years, working as a commercial chopper pilot and sweeping out Columbia Records’ local studio (where he reputedly first crossed paths with his future “Pat Garrett” co-star Bob Dylan, in town to record “Blonde on Blonde”). It took some convincing to get one of country music’s most prominent performers to pay attention to his songs, in an incident that became a Nashville legend.

Johnny Cash later recalled, “I didn’t really listen to them until one afternoon, he was flying a National Guard helicopter and he landed in my yard. I was taking a nap and June said, ‘Some fool has landed a helicopter in our yard. They used to come from the road. Now they’re coming from the sky!’ And I look up, and here comes Kris out of a helicopter with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other.”

As recorded by Cash, live on “The Johnny Cash Show,” Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became one of the writer’s first significant hits, and it was honored as song of the year by the Country Music Assn. He accepted the award in a famously bleary televised appearance.

Now legitimized as one of country’s most distinguished hit-crafting writers – with notable covers by such other top talents as Ray Stevens, Bobby Bare, Roger Miller and Waylon Jennings to his credit – he was signed to Monument in a long-term pact. His 1970 debut LP “Kristofferson” saw meager sales, but it rose to No. 10 on the country charts in 1971 after the label retitled the set “Me and Bobby McGee” in the wake of Joplin’s hit rendition.

A country music outlaw even before the term attained currency, Kristofferson racked up eight consecutive ‘70s albums in the country top 25. His mix of laconic charm and cool danger brought him a run of starring roles in Hollywood vehicles that included “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea” and “Semi-Tough.”

However, by the time “Heaven’s Gate” crashed and burned at the box office, alcohol and drug abuse had laid the hard-living performer low personally. He told the Guardian in 2008 that at the time he finally cut back on his drinking following his split with Coolidge, “[the] doctor said my liver was the size of a football and that if I didn’t quit, I was gonna kill myself.”

His renascent music and film careers proceeded steadily, if not spectacularly in comparison to his early stardom, from the ‘80s onward. Acting served as his principal focus in later years, though he continued to tour regularly. His recordings for Mercury Records, “Repossessed” (1986) and “Third World Warrior” (1990), contained outspoken statements of his left-tilting political views.

His deeds often spoke just as loudly. Just two weeks after Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992, she walked onstage at Madison Square Garden to perform at a tribute concert for Bob Dylan, to tumultuous boos and hecking. Kristofferson, who had introduced her as an “artist whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity,” had been asked to get her off the stage. Instead, he did the opposite.“I was not about to do that,” Kristofferson said in 2010 on the Irish talk show “Saturday Night With Miriam.” “I went out and I said ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down,’ and she said ‘I’m not down,’ and she sang. It was very courageous. It just seemed to me wrong, booing that little girl out there, but she’s always had courage.”

As a songwriter, he strived to find a balance between the strictly personal and bigger concerns. Talking with CMT in 2009, Kristofferson said, “I think you have to make it work on a one-to-one level first, as if you’re talking right to the person, but you just hope that you’ve written it well enough that people can identify with it and that it works on other levels.” Of “Me and Bobby McGee,” he said, “I remember [songwriter] Vince Matthews said, ‘You’ve got such a good song going on, why do you have to put that philosophy in there?'” — meaning “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” “And it turned out to be probably the most memorable line I ever wrote, so you’ve gotta take your friend’s advice with a grain of salt.”

In an interview with Variety‘s Chris Willman in the 2000s, he spoke about his views and how they were received by others. “I saw some book the other day called ‘Shut Up and Sing’ (by conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham), and my only feeling was: I am singing, dammit — shut up and listen!”

In the 2005 book “Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music,” Kristofferson said, “When I first started performing, it was in rock ‘n’ roll folk clubs like the Bitter End and the Troubadour. But eventually I was working in places whee I was getting a mostly country audience. I just felt it was my duty to tell the truth as I saw it, and in some places it didn’t go over very well. I can remember one time down in Atlanta — which I had always considered a friendly town because they had made such a big hit out of ‘Why Me,’ being the first ones to start playing that on the radio — about 300 people asked for their money back at a show I did. I was talking about Oliver North and the contras and what we were doing around the world.

“I remember Jackson Browne telling me years ago, ‘Listen, man, you’re taking a lot more chances than we are, because your audience is so much more conservative’,” he continued. “And that may be true. I guess I first started speaking out more in the ’80s or at the end of the ’70s. But I have a much more receptive audience today, because I think more people have had the experience that I had — they love their country and want to believe in it, but it’s hard to accept that we’re doing those people in Iraq any good.”

Ironically, perhaps, his first hit as a songwriter was with a top 20 country hit by Dave Dudley in 1966 that had lyrics knocking Vietnam protesters: “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues,” penned by a Colonel Kris Kristofferson, fresh out of the Army. “It wasn’t pro-war so much as it was pro-soldier,” he said in the book, “because I was still in the Army when I wrote it. Up until that time, all the information I got was from the Stars and Stripes, and it was a slow process of me changing my ideas… Within about two or three years, I’d gone about 180 degrees, thinking that the war was wrong.” But he never regretted having written a hit song that protested protesters. “It was pretty well-written, I have to say!” he noted. “And I remember how Harlan Howard [one of his country songwriting heroes] liked the song so much.”

Kristofferson added, “Everything is political. It just sounds worse if you call it political. I mean, we’re talking about life and death and the things that matter.”

He had a sense of humor about being better known from the movies among younger audiences. “I was doing a show in Sweden,” he told Willman, “and somebody backstage said, ‘There’s all these kids out there saying, ‘Geez, Whistler sings?'” — referring to his role in the “Blade” movies. 

In later years, Kristofferson suffered from memory loss, although it was misdiagnosed for many years, he and his family said. He was told he either had dementia from Alzheimer’s disease or was suffering from blows to the head suffered as a football and rugby player and boxer as a young man. But in 2016, a doctor diagnosed him as testing positive from Lyme disease.

“He was taking all these medications for things he doesn’t have, and they all have side effects,” his wife, Lisa, told Rolling Stone, adding that his condition improved once he stopped taking the drugs for other conditions. She said that he still suffered from memory lapses, but “some days he’s perfectly normal and it’s easy to forget that he is even battling anything.” His friend Chris Gantry told Closer Weekly, “It’s like Lazarus coming out of the grave and being born again.”

In the 2016 Rolling Stone interview, Kristofferson said, “I really have no anxiety about controlling my own life. Somehow I just slipped into it and it’s worked. It’s not up to me – or you. I feel very lucky that [life]’s lasted so long because I’ve done so many things that could have knocked me out of it. But somehow I just always have the feeling that He knows what He’s doing. It’s been good so far, and it’ll probably continue to be.”

Despite the memory issues, he continued performing full sets up until the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020.

Among his final public appearances, Kristofferson participated in duets on both nights of the Willie Nelson 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in 2023, singing “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” with Roseanne Cash on the first night and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” with Norah Jones on the second. Of his pairing with Cash, which was arguably the most moving moment of either night, Variety‘s reviewer wrote, “Kristofferson’s voice wasn’t built for sweet harmony singing even in the best of days. But how sweet it was, regardless, as Cash gave her spiritual uncle all the support he needed to make this sad memory song feel like a warm, communal hug.”

Bob Dylan held Kristofferson in such high regard that he quoted “Sunday Morning Coming Down” at length in an unexpectedly long speech accepting an award from the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Foundation in 2015.

Speaking about other songwriters, Dylan said, “Everything was all right until — until — Kristofferson came to town. Oh, they ain’t seen anybody like him. He came into [Nashville] like a wildcat, flew his helicopter into Johnny Cash’s backyard like a typical songwriter (laughter). And he went for the throat: ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’:

Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
So I had one more for dessert
Then I fumbled through my closet
Found my cleanest dirty shirt
Then I washed my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

“You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris,” Dylan said, “because he changed everything.”