Singer managed to have prolific acting career alongside his music
Kris Kristofferson frequently topped the US country charts and cover versions of his songs were hits for artists including Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight and Johnny Cash. In the mid-70s, he worked with film directors including Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, and won a Golden Globe for his work opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born. Photograph: Haydn West/PA
Admired for the grit, emotional vulnerability and literary craft of his country songwriting, Kristofferson frequently topped the US country charts and cover versions of his songs were hits for artists including Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight and Johnny Cash. In the mid-70s, he worked with film directors including Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, and won a Golden Globe for his work opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born.
Dolly Parton, who performed duets with Kristofferson such as From Here to the Moon and Back, wrote: “What a great loss. What a great writer. What a great actor. What a great friend. I will always love you, Dolly.” He continued performing music during a spell in the US army, where he became a helicopter pilot, a skill he continued after he left the forces in 1965 – angering his military family. “I took pride in being the best labour or the guy that could dig the ditches the fastest,” he later said. “Something inside me made me want to do the tough stuff . . . Part of it was that I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that I had to get out and live.
That year, Kristofferson recorded the first of 18 studio albums he would release during his career. He briefly dated Janis Joplin, who recorded his song Me and Bobby McGee, and it became a No 1 hit after her death in 1970. Another Kristofferson song from that year, Help Me Make It Through the Night, became a hit single for Sammi Smith and was later covered by Elvis Presley, Gladys Knight, Mariah Carey and others.
In the 1980s, he was a vocal critic of US president Ronald Reagan and foreign policy in Central America, when the US funded combat against left-wing forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Kristofferson’s 1986 album Repossessed made reference to the conflicts.
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