Kris Kristofferson has been a hustling musician, a marquee concert draw, an actor, a sex symbol,
an athlete, and a writer.
But most of all, he's a legend.
Here's the untold truth of Kris Kristofferson.
Kris Kristofferson was born into a military family and spent his childhood moving from
base to base.
Eventually, though, they settled down in San Mateo, California, where Kristofferson enrolled
at Pomona College.
He became a star athlete, excelling at football, rugby, and track and field, and earned the
coveted Golden Gloves honor for his skill at boxing.
But he was also a star student, and in 1958, he was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship,
which sent him to Oxford University in England to study English literature.
There, he began writing songs and performing in small venues, but pressure from his family
forced him to give up his dreams and instead join the Army.
He quickly excelled there too, becoming an Army Ranger and helicopter pilot.
Eventually, he was offered the chance to teach English at the famed West Point Military Academy.
But he had other ideas.
Before accepting the position at West Point, Kristofferson went on leave and decided to
visit Nashville, the center of country music.
A friend's cousin, Marijohn Wilkin, was a songwriter there, and she liked some of Kristofferson's
tunes.
The visit sealed it: Kristofferson turned down the position at West Point, quit the
Army, and moved to Nashville to try to make it as a songwriter.
He told Cowboys & Indians,
"I'd been writing songs since I was 11 years old.
And I knew immediately that this is where I belong."
His family was appalled.
His wife eventually divorced him, and his parents disowned him.
And he wasn't exactly an overnight success.
While he honed his craft and tried to sell his songs, Kristofferson made a meager living
by working as a janitor at Columbia Records' studios in Nashville, where he swept floors
and emptied ashtrays used by the likes of George Jones, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash.
Though Kristofferson soon began selling an occasional song here or there, it wasn't enough
to pay the bills, so he got a job as a helicopter pilot.
Finally, five long years after arriving in Nashville, the floodgates opened and Kristofferson
became a sensation, thanks in part to one particularly bold stunt.
While working as a janitor at the recording studio, he gave June Carter one of his demo
tapes, but her husband, Johnny Cash, wasn't interested in listening to the songs.
So Kristofferson decided to make an impression, he flew his helicopter straight to Cash's
house and landed it on his lawn!
Cash claimed that Kristofferson sauntered off the helicopter with a beer in one hand
and a demo in the other, but Kristofferson has said he doesn't remember Cash even being
home at the time.
Still, it worked.
Cash listened to Kristofferson's tune "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and decided to both record
it and play it live on his hit TV show.
The song became a smash sensation in 1970, just one of several mega hits Kristofferson
would write that year and the next, including "Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I'll
Ever Do Again", "Help Me Make it Through the Night", and "Me and Bobby McGee," which became
a posthumous #1 Billboard single for Kristofferson's ex-lover Janis Joplin in 1971.
Though Kristofferson's own singing career was up and down, he continued to pen hit after
hit in the early 70's.
And he didn't just write great songs, he also had an ear for identifying talent in others.
In 1971, Kristofferson played a four-night stand at the Quiet Knight club in Chicago
with Steve Goodman as his opening act.
Each night, Goodman implored Kristofferson to go across town to see a friend of his perform.
Finally, on the last night, Kristofferson relented and at 2 in the morning he got to
hear an unknown singer songwriter named John Prine play to a nearly empty club.
Prine told Billboard,
"I got on the stage right in front of him and sang about seven songs.
And then he bought me a beer and asked if I could get back up there and sing those seven
again and anything else I wrote."
Kristofferson was convinced, and soon introduced Prine to a number of key players in Nashville.
It led to a record deal, and soon Prine was recording his first album, consisting of those
same songs he had played for Kristofferson in that empty nightclub.
Prine told Billboard,
"It really was a Cinderella story, truly."
In 2020, just before he passed away, Prine was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award for a career that might not have happened were it not for the intervention of fellow
musician Kris Kristofferson.
Equal parts celebrity, wandering troubadour, and restless artist, it shouldn't come as
a surprise that Kris Kristofferson has loved and lost love a few times.
The singer-songwriter has been married several times, while also enjoying long and public
romances with many of his '70s musical contemporaries, as well as other celebrities.
Besides Janis Joplin, The Los Angeles Times reported that he also once dated Patti Davis,
a writer and often estranged daughter of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan.
Folk icon Joan Baez told the Chicago Tribune of her dalliance with Kristofferson, while
Carly Simon wrote in her memoir of a, quote, "slam-dunk deranged month or so" spent with
Kristofferson.
And at the height of Kristofferson's fame, 1973 to 1980, he was married to fellow singing
star Rita Coolidge, with whom he recorded the hit album "Full Moon."
Kristofferson's swinging days are now long behind him, though, as he has been happily
married to Lisa Meyers since 1983.
At the height of his music career, Kristofferson took an unexpected detour into acting, and
soon became one of the biggest leading men in Hollywood.
In the early '70s, he starred in several cult classics, including Sam Peckinpah's 1973 western
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Kristofferson played the latter title character and earned
a Most Promising Newcomer nomination at the BAFTA Awards.
Peckinpah then recruited Kristofferson to play a dangerous biker in his next feature,
the underworld drama Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
From there, Kristofferson jumped to leading man status as rancher David, love interest
for a world-weary waitress in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Able to play romantic leads while also boasting a musical background made Kristofferson the
perfect choice to play John Norman Howard, the fading rock star who discovers an exciting
new talent (played by Barbra Streisand) in A Star is Born, remake of the 1937 and 1954
films.
Kristofferson won a Golden Globe for his performance.
Just when it seemed like he was at his peak, though, one ill-fated role derailed and nearly
destroyed his career.
At the end of the 70's, Kristofferson agreed to star in Heaven's Gate, a slow, meditative,
experimental sort of Western about a little-known land dispute in 1890s Wyoming, from The Deer
Hunter filmmaker Michael Cimino.
Significantly over-budget and past-deadline, the film is regarded as one the biggest bombs
in Hollywood history.
Suddenly, Kristofferson was a Hollywood pariah.
He told The Los Angeles Times,
"I'm sure it knocked me off the course I had been on right then.
I think that it made me, for a while, unmarketable."
Though his acting career was seemingly finished, Kristofferson managed to get back on his feet
musically, with a little help from his friends.
In 1984, Johnny Cash was filming the holiday TV special Christmas on the Road in Montreux,
Switzerland, and he implored some friends and colleagues to join him.
They just so happened to be three of the biggest names in country music: Willie Nelson, Waylon
Jennings, and, of course, Kris Kristofferson.
After taping all day, they'd head back to the studio to jam well into the evening, and
according to Rolling Stone, they realized that they played together so well that they
might as well form a supergroup and cut an album.
The project was a landmark country event.
Released in 1985 and titled Highwayman, the single of the same name hit #1 on the country
music charts, and the follow-up, "Desperados Waiting for a Train," hit #15.
The album's name soon became the group's name (sort of): the Highwaymen.
In addition to establishing themselves as the tastemakers and the godfathers of modern
country music, and laying the groundwork for other monumental collaborations, the Highwaymen
became a pop culture machine.
The foursome also starred together in the 1986 made-for-TV movie Stagecoach and four
discs' worth of audio dramatizations of classic Louis L'Amour western stories, while releasing
more albums in 1990 and 1995.
Kris Kristofferson's acting career got back on track in the '90s, thanks in large part
to an acclaimed role in the indie hit Lone Star.
And that led to easily his best-known role as the fan favorite badass Abraham Whistler
in Blade.
A man shattered by the loss of his entire family to vampires, he takes teenage vampire
Blade into his care, gives him a serum he's developed to quell the blood hunger, and trains
his young charge in his profession: vampire hunting.
While the Blade trilogy is based on Marvel Comics characters, Whistler did not originate
in print, Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer invented him.
Goyer told The Comics Continuum,
"I thought it would be interesting for Blade to have a teacher.
The aging gunfighter who passes down his knowledge."
Goyer first considered Patrick McGoohan or Jon Voigt for the role, until he was blown
away by Kristofferson's performance in Lone Star.
Kristofferson so enjoyed playing Whistler that he returned for two Blade sequels.
A cruel twist in the story of Kris Kristofferson, a man whose life has been overstuffed with
one adventure and accomplishment after another: For many years, he couldn't remember a lot
of it.
According to Rolling Stone, the singer-songwriter began to suffer memory loss in his seventies,
which doctors originally attributed to either an encroaching case of Alzheimer's disease,
or dementia caused by repeated strikes to the head suffered during his days boxing and
playing football and rugby when he was a high school and college student.
Kristofferson's mental deterioration got to the point where he'd forget what he was doing
in the middle of activities, and his attempts to write a song about it faltered.
In 2016, though, Kristofferson got an unexpected ray of hope when he tested positive for Lyme
disease.
Proper treatment for that condition, along with dropping the strong medications he was
taking for Alzheimer's, combined to largely restore Kristofferson's mental acuity.
His wife Lisa told Rolling Stone,
"Some days he's perfectly normal and it's easy to forget that he is even battling anything."
Kristofferson believes he first contracted the sickness from a tick bite he got while
shooting the movie Disappearances in the Vermont forest in 2006.
Kristofferson stands up for what he believes, a trait that has often gotten him in hot water
with fans on both sides of the political divide.
In the late '70s, the far-left-wing Sandinistas successfully staged a revolution in Nicaragua.
They faced violent resistance from the Contras, a group financially backed by the Ronald Reagan
administration.
Kristofferson publicly favored the Sandinistas, even making trips to Nicaragua.
He told The Washington Post,
"I'm a supporter, I know it's not hip to be."
His support for left-wing causes cost him fans among the traditionally conservaitve
country music fan base, and after he spoke out against the Gulf War in 1991, protestors
picketed his shows.
But Kristofferson has angered progressives, too.
In 1987, ABC aired Amerika, a miniseries about life in the US after a Soviet coup.
Kristofferson starred as a patriotic freedom fighter.
Around that time, he attended a protest in Nevada, one among 2,000 opposed to the United
States' Cold War move to resume nuclear testing.
Kristofferson told The Washington Post,
"As you can imagine, the place was full of people who were violently opposed to the film.
This woman came up and said, 'You can't atone for Amerika by doing this.'"
So why did he take the role?
Kristofferson explained,
"I did not want to be involved in anything that increased Cold War tensions, but the
fact is that the film was going to be made, and I felt that it was important that the
part of the hero be played by somebody coming from my position."
And that position, as always, is one of conviction.
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