“Songwriter” may be the first term that comes to mind when describing Kris Kristofferson, who has died at the age of 88, but he could also claim to be a singer, movie star, soldier and academic. Kristofferson was very cerebral but also a rugged man of action and came from the same fine tradition of rugged American individualists as his friends Johnny Cash and Sam Peckinpah.

Kristofferson’s greatest successes as a singer-songwriter came in the 1970s, most notably with the albums The Silver Tongued Devil and I (1971), Border Lord (1972) and Jesus Was a Capricorn (1972), all major country hits that also charted. of pop albums. However, before he gained recognition as an artist, Kristofferson was already known for supplying hit songs to other artists.

His first hit was Vietnam Blues, recorded by Dave Dudley in 1966, but the ball really started rolling when Roger Miller recorded three Kristofferson songs for his album Roger Miller (1969). One of these was Me and Bobby McGee, the bittersweet story of a pair of lovers and their lives on the road, and Miller entered the country music Top 20. Inspired in part by the Federico Fellini film La Strada (1954), it would become a of Kristofferson’s most covered songs.

Then Ray Stevens hit the map with Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, the lament of the desolate alcoholic that would become a hit for Cash the following year, Faron Young took Your Time’s Comin’ to the country Top 5, and Jerry Lee Lewis followed suit with Once More With Gevoy.

Kristofferson’s magic also worked for Ray Price, who took For the Good Times to No. 1 in the country and the pop Top 20 in 1970, while Sammi Smith scored a pop Top 10 hit with Help Me Make It Through the Night. By the time Janis Joplin’s cover of Me and Bobby McGee topped the charts in March 1971, just months after Joplin’s death, Kristofferson (who had had a brief affair with the troubled singer) had become one of the hottest songwriting names in Nashville .

His debut album, Kristofferson, had gone nowhere after its release in April 1970, even though it contained songs made into hits by other singers, and despite Kristofferson’s performance at the major Isle of Wight festival that year. But after turning a corner commercially with Silver Tongued Devil, the first album was re-released as Me and Bobby McGee – and that earned him a gold record. In 1972, several of his songs were nominated for a Grammy, and he won best country song for Help Me Make It Through the Night.

By the time Jesus Was a Capricorn topped the country charts in 1973, boosted by the crossover hit single Why Me, Kristofferson’s attention had turned to acting. He had already appeared in Dennis Hopper’s chaotic The Last Movie (1971) and played a down-and-out musician in Cisco Pike (1972), and now it was his connection with Peckinpah that kicked his film career into high gear.

Peckinpah cast him as Billy the Kid in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), which featured Bob Dylan in an acting role and provided songs for the soundtrack, and he collaborated with Peckinpah again on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). and Convoy (1978).

In 1973, Kristofferson married singer Rita Coolidge (his second wife) and the couple had a major pop and country hit with their first duet album, Full Moon, which spawned a string of hit singles, including the Grammy-winning From the Bottle to the Bottom. . They enjoyed further success with the albums Breakaway (1974) and Natural Act (1978).

Meanwhile, Kristofferson starred in Martin Scorsese’s first Hollywood studio production, the romantic comedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), with Ellen Burstyn. Two years later, he ascended to blockbuster heaven when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in the remake of A Star Is Born (their on-screen relationship continued off-screen). The film was slammed by critics, but earned $150 million at the box office and earned Kristofferson a Golden Globe for Best Actor.

Coolidge and Kristofferson divorced in 1980. Coolidge noted wryly, “I can’t say enough about what a wonderful man he was. It’s just that he was a lousy husband… He was a very toxic person with all his drinking and womanizing.”

Kristofferson discussed how he had idolized country singer Hank Williams, noting that “most heroes in that vein have been pretty self-destructive, and I was myself for a while.” I drank a lot just to get on stage. In the beginning I wasn’t very confident.” He stopped drinking alcohol in 1980 after his doctor warned him he was committing suicide.

His leading role as Jim Averill in Heaven’s Gate (1980) should have been a crowning triumph for Kristofferson, but Michael Cimino’s ominous western became a byword for waste and excess, bankrupting the United Artists studios. He enjoyed only modest success with Flashpoint (1984) and the same year co-starred with Willie Nelson in Songwriter, for which he wrote several songs and won an Academy Award nomination for original musical score. Together with Nelson he released the successful duo album Music from Songwriter.

He experienced a revival in the 1990s after appearing as a corrupt sheriff in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996). This led to roles in a string of successful big-budget films, including Payback (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001) and the Blade trilogy (1998, 2002 and 2004).

Kristofferson was born in the town of Brownsville, Texas. He was the eldest of three children of Mary Ann Ashbrook and Lars Kristofferson, an Air Force pilot who rose to the rank of major general. Military life took the family to California, where Kris graduated from San Mateo High School in 1954 and then studied creative writing at Pomona College.

He won first prize in a short story contest sponsored by the literary magazine Atlantic Monthly, and was also recognized by Sports Illustrated for his many achievements in football and athletics during his college years.

He later received a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, and it was in Britain that he began performing his own songs. He fell into the orbit of the “beat svengali” Larry Parnes, who secured him some recording sessions (under the name Kris Carson) with Top Rank Records and producer Tony Hatch.

Fortunately, perhaps Parnes didn’t succeed in turning him into the next Tommy Steele, and after earning his master’s degree in English literature in 1960 – he also won a boxing blue while at Oxford – Kristofferson returned to the US.

It didn’t take long before he was back in Europe. After marrying Fran Beer in 1960, he joined the U.S. Army, became a helicopter pilot and was assigned to West Germany. He continued to write and perform music and formed a band with some fellow soldiers. One of his comrades was a cousin of Nashville songwriter Marijohn Wilkin, who positively reviewed Kristofferson’s work when he sent her some of his songs. After completing his military service with the rank of captain in 1965, he was offered a post at the West Point Military Academy as an English instructor.

However, he took a trip to the city of Nashville to visit Wilkin, which convinced him to leave the military and devote his efforts to becoming a country music songwriter. He earned a small stipend from a deal with Wilkins’ music publishing company Bighorn and worked at a variety of jobs, including flying helicopters to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and taking a job as a studio janitor.

He was working at the Columbia Records studios in Nashville when Dylan came to town to record his album Blonde on Blonde (1966), and it was here that Kristofferson first met Cash, who would become a loyal friend and supporter.

“John told everyone in town that Mickey Newbury and I were the best songwriters,” Kristofferson recalls. “For me it was really something to be supported by someone like Cash, like being supported by Dylan.”

Kristofferson’s increasingly left-wing political sympathies were reflected in his album Repossessed (1987), which gave him a hit single with They Killed Him (a tribute to Gandhi, Christ and Martin Luther King), and he appeared in the television miniseries America (1987) . ), which depicted a US under communist rule. Another politically oriented album, Third World Warrior (1990), failed to chart.

In 1985, Kristofferson and Nelson teamed up with Cash and Waylon Jennings to record Highwayman, and both the album and the title song were top country chart hits. This gathering of charismatic and beloved country greats became known as the Highwaymen and enjoyed further success both as a touring act and with the albums Highwaymen 2 (1990) and The Road Goes on Forever (1995).

Kristofferson completed a hat trick of albums with producer Don Was, This Old Road (2006), Closer to the Bone (2009) and Feeling Mortal (2013). His last studio album was The Cedar Creek Sessions (2016), which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Americana Album.

After suffering from memory loss for several years that doctors believed was caused by Alzheimer’s disease, Kristofferson was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease in February 2016. After proper treatment, his condition improved significantly. “It’s like Lazarus coming out of the grave and being born again,” said his friend, Nashville singer-songwriter Chris Gantry.

In November 2018, he performed Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You at Both Sides Now – Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration, in celebration of Mitchell’s 75th birthday. He gave his last full live performance at the Sunrise theater in the city of Fort Pierce, Florida, in 2020.

Having previously been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (1977) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1985), he was embraced by the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004 and won the Songwriters’ Johnny Mercer Award in 2006 Hall of Fame. Fame.

He once said he wanted the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on the Wire on his gravestone:

Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I tried to be free in my own way

He is survived by his third wife, Lisa Meyers, whom he married in 1983, and their daughter, Kelly Marie, and sons, Jesse, Jody, Johnny and Blake; by a daughter, Casey, from his second marriage; and by a daughter, Tracy, and a son, Kris, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.