Kris Kristofferson, singer-songwriter & actor, dies at age 88.

Los Angeles (AP) — Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a slick writing style and gruff charm who went on to become a country music superstar and an A-list Hollywood actor, has passed away.

Kristofferson died on Saturday at his Maui, Hawaii, home, according to family spokesperson Ebie McFarland in an email. He was 88.

According to McFarland, Kristofferson died peacefully in the arms of his family. There was no explanation for what occurred.

Kristofferson, who could read William Blake from memory, combined sophisticated folk music lyrics about loneliness and sweet passion with popular country music. With his long hair, bell-bottomed pants, and counterculture tunes influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters, along with such colleagues as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.

“There is no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson declared at a BMI award presentation in 2009. “Everything he writes is a standard and we are all just going to have to live with that.”

Kristofferson stopped performing and recording in 2021, making only sporadic stage appearances, including a performance with Cash’s daughter Rosanne during Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 2023. The two sang “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I will Ever Do Again),” which was a smash for Kristofferson and a lifelong live staple for Nelson, another outstanding interpreter of his music.

In the mid-1980s, Nelson and Kristofferson formed the country supergroup “The Highwaymen” alongside Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

Kristofferson was a Golden Gloves boxer, rugby star, and football player in college; he earned a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England; and he flew helicopters as a captain in the United States Army before declining an appointment to teach at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to get into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966, when Dylan recorded recordings for the breakthrough “Blonde on Blonde” double album.

At times, Kristofferson’s legend was larger than life. Cash loved to tell a highly exaggerated story about Kristofferson landing a helicopter on his lawn and handing him a recording of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” while holding a drink. With all due respect to Cash, Kristofferson has stated in interviews over the years that, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the Man in Black was not even present at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever really cut, and he could not fly a helicopter while drinking beer.

In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, he stated that he may not have had a career without Cash.

“Shaking his hand when I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I would decide I would come back,” Kristofferson told the audience. “It was electrifying. He kind of took me under his wing before he recorded any of my tunes. He produced my first album, which was the record of the year. “He put me on stage for the first time.”

“Me and Bobby McGee,” one of his most recorded songs, was composed in response to Monument Records founder Fred Foster’s proposal. Foster had the song title “Me and Bobby McKee” in his brain, named after a female secretary in his workplace. In an interview with the magazine “Performing Songwriter,” Kristofferson stated that he was inspired to compose the lyrics about a man and lady on the road together after seeing the Frederico Fellini film “La Strada.”

Joplin, who had a close friendship with Kristofferson, altered the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a guy and recorded her version just days before her death from a heroin overdose in 1970. The recording became Joplin’s posthumous No. 1 smash.

Kristofferson released hits including “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I would Like to Sing,” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”

In 1973, he married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge, and the two had a successful duet career that garnered them two Grammy Awards. They divorced in 1980.

The establishment of the Highwaymen, with Nelson, Cash, and Jennings, was another watershed moment in his career as a musician.

“I think I was different from the other guys in that I came in it as a fan of all of them,” Kristofferson told the Associated Press in 2005. “I respected them while I was still in the Army. When I moved to Nashville, they were like great idols to me because they took their music seriously. It seemed surreal to be not just recorded by them, but also to be friends with them and work alongside them. “It was like seeing your face on Mount Rushmore.”

From 1985 to 1995, the group released just three albums. Jennings died in 2002, while Cash died a year later. Kristofferson stated in 2005 that there was some discussion of reuniting the group with other musicians, such as George Jones or Hank Williams Jr., but that it would not have been the same.

“When I look back now — I know I hear Willie say it was the best time of his life,” Kristofferson stated in 2005. “I wish I had been more mindful of how brief the time would be. Despite the fact that it had been several years, it seemed like a blink. “I wish I had cherished every moment.”

Nelson is the only one of the four still living.

Kristofferson’s sharply worded political songs occasionally hampered his appeal, particularly in the late 1980s. His 1989 album “Third World Warrior” concentrated on Central America and the consequences of US policies, but reviewers and fans were unimpressed with the overtly political songs.

During a 1995 interview with the Associated Press, he recalled a woman objecting about one of the songs, which began with slaughtering infants in the cause of freedom.

“And I asked, ‘Well, what got you mad—the fact that I was saying it or the fact that we are doing it? They were upset at me because I told them what was going on.”

He joined the Army in the 1960s because he was 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 do my service,” he said in a 2006 AP interview. “From my upbringing and generation, honor and service to one’s nation were taken for granted. So, later, when you come to question some of the acts done in your name, it was really terrible.”

Hollywood may have rescued his musical career. Even though he could not afford to travel with a full band, he was able to get notoriety through film and television roles.

Kristofferson played his first appearance in Dennis Hopper’s 1971 film “The Last Movie.”

He enjoyed Westerns and used his gravelly voice to portray beautiful, stoic leading males. He played Burstyn’s ruggedly gorgeous love interest in “Alice Does not Live Here Anymore” and a sad rock star in a tumultuous romance with Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” a character reprised by Bradley Cooper in the 2018 adaptation.

He played the teenage title outlaw in filmmaker Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” a truck driver for the same director in 1978’s “Convoy,” and a corrupt sheriff in director John Sayles’ 1996 film, “Lone Star.”

He also appeared in “Heaven’s Gate,” a 1980 Western that cost tens of millions of dollars more than expected.

In a rare cameo in a superhero film, he portrayed the tutor of Snipes’ vampire hunter in “Blade.”

In a 2006 AP interview, he revealed how he landed his first acting roles while performing in Los Angeles.

“It just happened that my first professional gig was at the Troubadour in L.A. opening for Linda Rondstadt,” Kristofferson recalled. “Robert Hilburn (Los Angeles Times music critic) wrote a fantastic review and the concert was held over for a week,” Kristofferson told the crowd. “There were a lot of movie folks coming in, and I started getting film offers despite having no prior experience. Of course, I had no performance experience.”

Hall reported from Nashville. Hillel Italie, an AP National Writer, contributed to this story.

SOURCE