Kris Kristofferson, photographed in 2002 in Los Angeles.

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Kris Kristofferson, who wrote indelible songs about lovers, loners, drinkers and a few casual hitchhikers — and who later became a movie star and appeared in dozens of films — has died aged 88.

According to his representative, the singer, songwriter and actor died peacefully at his home in Maui, Hawaii, surrounded by family on Saturday, September 28. No cause of death was shared.

Kristofferson made a name for himself as a songwriter in Nashville beginning in the late 1960s, with songs like “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” which featured other singers (Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Sammi Smith, respectively) reached the top of the charts.

His fame and status as a sex symbol grew through his film roles, most notably when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A star is born.

“I imagined myself having a pretty full life,” Kristofferson told NPR’s Fresh air in 1999. “I certainly wasn’t equipped by God to be a football player, but I had to become one. And I had to be a Ranger, and a paratrooper, and a helicopter pilot, you know, and a boxer, and a lot of things for which I don’t think I was built for it, I just imagined it.”

Kristofferson won three Grammy awards, two of which were for duets with his then-wife Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973 to 1980. His performance in A star is born won him a Golden Globe in 1976.

In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and in 2014 he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

He found his calling as a writer early on

Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas to a military family; his father was a major general in the United States Air Force. It was there, at the age of 11, that he wrote his first song, entitled “I Hate Your Ugly Face.” (He included that song as a bonus track on one of his last albums, Closer to the bonein 2009.)

At Pomona College in Southern California, Kristofferson studied creative literature. His many diverse talents attracted the attention of Sports illustratedin which he was featured as one of the “Faces in the Crowd” in 1954. “This dashing young man,” the magazine trumpeted, not only played rugby and varsity football and was a Golden Gloves boxer; he was also sports editor of the college newspaper, a folk singer, an award-winning writer and an “outstanding” ROTC cadet.

From Pomona, Kristofferson won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where he immersed himself in the works of Shakespeare and William Blake.

In a 1999 interview with NPR’s Morning editionhe explained that Blake “was a wonderful example for someone who wanted to be an artist, because he believed that if you were cut out for it, it was your moral responsibility to be one, otherwise you would be haunted all your life and after death – until eternity!”

Perhaps inspired by Blake’s warning, Kristofferson harbored the dream of writing the Great American Novel. Instead, after Oxford, he followed his father into the military and joined the U.S. Army, where he became a helicopter pilot and reached the rank of captain. Assigned to teach literature at West Point, Kristofferson decided to leave the military, moving to Nashville to pursue his dream of songwriting.

Because of that choice he was disowned by his parents. “They thought I had gone crazy somewhere between Oxford and the Army,” Kristofferson told Pomona College Magazine in 2004. “My mother said that no one over the age of 14 listens to that kind of stuff anyway… But I became more and more determined to And it was a kind of liberation for me to go that way, because I had nothing left to lose.”

From janitor to hit songwriter

When Kristofferson arrived in Nashville in 1965, he got a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios, sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays while writing songs on the side.

He often compared the creative ferment of Nashville in the 1960s to that of Paris in the 1920s. “When I got there,” he said in 1999 Fresh air interview: “It was so different from any life I’d lived before; just hanging out with these people who stayed up three or four days at a time and were writing songs the whole time.”

“I think I wrote four songs in the first week I was there,” he continued. “And it was just so exciting for me. It was like a lifeboat, you know? It was like my salvation.”

The story goes that Kristofferson was so desperate to get his songs into the hands of Johnny Cash that he landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn. In the version Cash always told, Kristofferson emerged with a cassette tape in one hand and a beer in the other.

“It’s a great story, and one where we have to believe the good even if it’s not true,” jokes musician Rodney Crowell, who became Cash’s son-in-law when he married Rosanne Cash. “But you know, according to John, that literally happened.”

Johnny Cash would be instrumental in launching Kristofferson’s career by introducing him at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival and inviting him to appear on his television variety show.

His songs were like short stories

Rodney Crowell was one of many young songwriters drawn to Nashville by the beacon of Kristofferson’s success. “Thanks to Kris Kristofferson, a lot of songwriters came to Nashville in droves. And I was part of that wave,” he tells NPR.

What set Kristofferson’s music apart, Crowell says, was the way he wove a story and sustained a narrative in his songs. Take ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ for example: a vivid portrait of gloomy, hungover loneliness. Crowell calls the song “a beautifully written short story”.

Well, I woke up Sunday morning without a way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had another one for dessert

Then I looked in my closet for my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt

And I shaved my face and combed my hair and stumbled down the stairs to face the day

Musician Steve Earle recalls that when he first heard “Sunday Morning Coming Down” as a teenager in Texas, it made such an impact that he rushed to buy Kristofferson’s first two records.

“The imagery and language is definitely taken to a higher level than anything that has ever happened in country music before,” says Earle.

Kristofferson, he says, “lyrically raised the bar in country music to a place that writers still strive for, and that I still strive for to this day..“

He was a master of seduction, both in song and on screen

For Nashville, Kristofferson’s 1970 song about naked, unapologetic desire, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” was nothing short of revolutionary. “It was earth-shattering and a paradigm shift,” Crowell says. “It’s literally a form of seduction. It’s silver-tongued seduction.”

Remove the ribbon from your hair
Shake it loose and let it fall

Feels soft on my skin

Like the shadows on the wall

Come and lie down next to me

‘Until the early morning light

All I’m taking is your time

Help me get through the night

In person and on screen, Kristofferson was magnetic: gorgeous movie star, with a roguish grin and electric blue eyes.

“Women loved him, you know? I mean, he absolutely fell over,” Crowell says. “He was a sex symbol and a rock star.”

For a young, enthusiastic musician like Crowell, Kristofferson provided an intoxicating role model.

“It was like, ‘Hmm, that’s what I want to be like,’” Crowell says. “I thought, ‘How do you do that? How do you have such swagger?'”

Kristofferson brought that same sensual swagger to his film roles throughout his decades-long career. He starred in films including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Alice no longer live here, A star is born, semi-strong, Heavenly Gate And Lone starin collaboration with directors Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Alan Rudolph and John Sayles, among others.

For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, Kristofferson was part of a country outlaw supergroup, teaming with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson to form the Highwaymen. Reflecting on that time in an interview with the British magazine Classic rock years later he said, “I wish I was more aware of how lucky I was to share a stage with those people. I had no idea two of them (Cash and Jennings) would be done so quickly. Damn , I was up there and I had all my heroes with me – these are guys whose ashtrays I was cleaning. I’m a little surprised I wasn’t more surprised.’

In the 1980s and 1990s, Kristofferson also embraced a number of left-wing political causes. He protested nuclear testing in Nevada and vocally opposed U.S. policy in Central America, made several trips to Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista government and denounced U.S. support for El Salvador’s military-led junta in the brutal civil war of that country. “I’m a songwriter,” he said in 1988 Fresh air interview: “but I’m also concerned about my fellow human beings. And I’m really concerned about the soul of my country.” His 1990 album, Third World warrioris filled with songs that express his political views:

Broken rules and dirty fighters spreading lies and secret funds
We cannot defeat the Campesino with their money and their weapons

Because he is fighting for his future and his freedom and his sons

In the third world war

Music connected him to memory

In his later years, Kristofferson suffered from severe memory loss, but he continued to perform until 2020. Among those he shared the stage with was Margo Price. “Without a doubt,” she says, “he had the same charisma and sex appeal every time.”

Onstage, Price says, Kristofferson was able to connect with his musical memories and “feel like he was himself… There have been moments when I stepped off stage with Kris and thought, ‘Great show, Kris!’ He says, ‘Oh, thanks. You know, I wish I could have been there!’ I mean, the powerful thing about watching him play his songs was that he could remember songs he wrote so long ago, and yet he couldn’t remember anything from five minutes ago.”

In a 2013 interview with NPR, Kristofferson reflected on his life and career. At the age of 76, he had just released an album titled Feeling mortal.

“To my surprise,” he told Rachel Martin, “I feel nothing but gratitude that I am so old, and still above ground, living with the people I love. I’ve had a life full of all kinds of experiences, most of which are good, I have eight children and a wife who puts up with everything I do and keeps me out of trouble.”

Kristofferson lived for many years on the island of Maui, in a house high on the slope of Haleakala Volcano, with a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. In 2016, he told an interviewer, “I’ve had so much blessing and so much reward for my life that I want to stay where I am, which is on an island with no neighbors and an empty 180-degree horizon. It’s a beautiful place.” display.”