The esteemed singer-songwriter behind “Me and Bobby McGee” and dozens of other hits was also memorable on the big screen in ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ and ‘A Star Is Born.’
Kris Kristofferson, the soulful country music superstar who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” performed with the supergroup The Highwaymen and made audiences swoon in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star Is Born, has died. He was 88.
Kristofferson died Saturday at home in Maui, Hawaii, his family announced. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” they said in a statement. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”
A native of South Texas, Kristofferson starred in football and rugby and won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament while attending Pomona College in California; earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study literature abroad; and piloted helicopters in the U.S. Army.
He threw away a career in the military and moved to Nashville, where he worked as a janitor at Columbia Records and watched as Bob Dylan recorded his seminal 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. It took Kristofferson many months before his music career finally took hold.
His drifter ballad “Me and Bobby McGee” was initially recorded by Roger Miller in 1969 before Janis Joplin made it a rock classic, her throaty version topping the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, not too long after she died of a heroin overdose.
Kristofferson also performed “Help Me Make It Through the Night” on his 1970 self-titled album, but it was Sammi Smith’s version that became one of the most enduring singles in the annals of country music, vaulting as high as No. 8 on the Billboard chart. (A couple years ago, Bono told THR‘s Scott Feinberg that he thinks “Help Me Make It Through the Night” is the greatest song of all time.)
Kristofferson said he wrote the song after reading a quote from Frank Sinatra, who, when asked what he believed in, replied, “Booze, broads or a bible…whatever helps me make it through the night.”
Kristofferson received the best country song Grammy Award for writing “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and he added trophies in 1973 and 1975 for his duets with then-wife Rita Coolidge on “From the Bottle to the Bottom” and “Lover Please,” respectively (he authored the first one as well).
Kristofferson also wrote a morose song about a hangover, “Sunday Mornin‘ Comin‘ Down,” that was the Country Music Association’s song of the year in 1970 and a big hit for Ray Stevens and then Johnny Cash; “The Taker,” notably recorded by Waylon Jennings; “For the Good Times,” made popular by Ray Price and named song of the year by the Academy of Country Music in 1971; and “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends,” which Ronnie Milsap made his own.
“The reason I came to Nashville was that the lyrics here were the best that I could identify from my experience,” he told American Songwriter magazine in 1994. “The people that were writing the closest thing to white man’s soul music were country writers. They were writing about real life — about sex and cheating and drinking and losing and stuff like that. I figured the most honest you could be would be the most successful.”
In 1985, Kristofferson, singing and strumming his trusty Gibson guitar, teamed with buddies Cash, Jennings and Willie Nelson to form The Highwaymen, and the four “outlaws” released three albums through 1995 and thrilled live audiences before Jennings and Cash succumbed to poor health.
Describing his weathered, whiskey-soaked voice, Esquire wrote in 2014: “Kristofferson’s never quite seemed to take flight, but his being stuck down here with the rest of us mortals made him that much more one of us. It’s a voice held together by scars, and the songs that he made up out of his imagination always had the benefit of being founded on some kind of truth, like that voice in your ear you just know is right.”
The charismatic Kristofferson was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985, entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004 and was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He received an Academy Award nomination for best score in 1985 for Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter, in which he starred as singer Blackie Buck opposite Nelson in the Nashville-set tale.
Starting with Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971), Kristofferson brought his manly, craggy persona to the fore in such films as Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), the Michael Cimino debacle Heaven’s Gate (1980) and, as a corrupt sheriff in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996).
He starred as love interests for Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), for Sarah Miles in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1976) and — as alcoholic, has-been singer John Norman Howard — for Barbra Streisand in the remake of A Star Is Born (1976).
In an Instagram post Sunday, Streisand wrote: “The first time I saw Kris performing at the Troubadour club in L.A. I knew he was something special. Barefoot and strumming his guitar, he seemed like the perfect choice for a script I was developing, which eventually became A Star Is Born.
“In the movie, Kris and I sang the song I’d written for the film’s main love theme, ‘Evergreen.’
“For my latest concert in 2019 at London’s Hyde Park, I asked Kris to join me onstage to sing our other A Star Is Born duet, ‘Lost Inside of You.’ He was as charming as ever, and the audience showered him with applause. It was a joy seeing him receive the recognition and love he so richly deserved.”
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Diane Ladd, Kristofferson‘s co-star in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, also paid tribute to the late star, calling him “one of the most professional performers and gentlemen” with whom she’s worked during her career. She recalled a story Kristofferson once told her about how he got his big break: He said he paid a helicopter to land in Johnny Cash’s front yard so that he could entice Cash to listen to his song. “It worked. and the rest is history,” Ladd recalled.
Kristoffer Kristofferson was born June 22, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas, the oldest of three children of an Air Force major-general. As such, he spent much of his youth moving around the country and wound up graduating from high school in San Mateo, California. That peripatetic lifestyle never left his veins.
Kristofferson graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1958 from Pomona, where he majored in creative literature; participated in football, rugby and boxing (he made Sports Illustrated‘s “Faces in the Crowd” column as a senior); and was sports editor of the college paper.
This unlikely combination of brains and brawn helped him win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University’s Merton College, and he became a disciple of English poet William Blake. Yet despite such esoteric exploration, he never abandoned his lifelong admiration for the down-home poetry of his idol, Hank Williams.
Kristofferson recorded a few songs under the name Kris Carson while overseas before leaving Oxford with a predoctoral graduate degree in 1960 to join the U.S. Army, where he served in West Germany and completed ranger school, parachute-jump school and pilot training. All the while, he was writing song after song.
On track to become a major and offered a position to teach English literature at West Point in 1965, Kristofferson took a two-week leave and headed to Nashville (he arrived while still in uniform). He then resigned from the Army.
While trying to break into the business, Kristofferson flew commercial helicopters and worked as a janitor at Columbia and on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, where he penned “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” The first song that he wrote that was recorded was “Vietnam Blues,” by Dave Dudley in 1966.
As a janitor, Kristofferson had been trying to get Cash to listen to his work, but to no avail. So, in 1969, Kristofferson landed his National Guard helicopter on Cash’s property outside Nashville and emerged with demo tapes for the singer.
The brash move paid off. Later that year, Cash brought Kristofferson onstage with him at the Newport Folk Festival and would feature him on his ABC variety show. “It started a whole performing career I just didn’t anticipate,” he said. “I was tickled to death that people were just starting to cut my songs.”
Kristofferson also performed at the third Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 in a lineup that also featured Jim Hendrix, The Who, The Doors, Miles Davis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Kristofferson starred as a down-on-his-luck musician who deals marijuana in the 1972 film Cisco Pike (the soundtrack included songs from his second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I), and Peckinpah made him a movie star a year later when he cast him as William H. Bonney in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. (Kristofferson helped get Dylan a role in the movie.)
When Scorsese received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010, Kristofferson was on hand to reminisce about working with the director on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
“I was scared to death and stupid and slow and Marty was bright and fast and articulate and compassionate and intense, and it was wonderful,” he said. “And then on Taxi Driver, you had Robert De Niro giving Cybill Shepherd one of my albums [and] quoting my songs; she said my name like I was Bob Dylan or something.”
Kristofferson won a Golden Globe for his work in A Star Is Born opposite Streisand, whom he had once dated. (That caused a bit of friction with Streisand’s then-boyfriend, Jon Peters, a producer on the film.) The movie grossed $80 million ($442 million in today’s dollars), second only to Rocky that year, and spawned a successful soundtrack.
Kristofferson also played wide receiver Marvin “Shake” Tiller and Burt Reynolds‘ buddy in Semi-Tough (1977) and was Abraham Whistler, the mentor of Wesley Snipes’ character, in Blade (1998) and its 2002 sequel.
His acting résumé — with more than 120 listings on IMDb — also included Paul Mazursky‘s Blume in Love (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Convoy (1978), Trouble in Mind (1985), Big Top Pee-wee (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), Payback (1999), Limbo (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001), Dolphin Tale (2011) and its 2014 follow-up, Joyful Noise (2012), and Traded (2016). He often contributed songs to his films.
Kristofferson was married to Francis Beer, his high-school girlfriend, from 1961 to 1969; to Coolidge from 1973 to 1980; and to attorney Lisa Meyers since 1983. She survives him, as do his children, Tracy, Kris Jr., Casey, Jesse, Jody, John, Kelly and Blake; and his seven grandchildren.
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Kristofferson said he owed his career to a higher power.
“I really have no anxiety about controlling my own life,” he said. “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.”
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
