In the early 1970s he became well-known as a performer with a rumbling, unpolished baritone, as well as an in-demand actor, notably opposite Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, one of the most popular films of 1976.
“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Willie Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI.
“Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”
Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, on June 22, 1936, and moved frequently because his father was a general in the Air Force. After graduating from Pomona College in California, where he played football and rugby, Kristofferson attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and then fulfilled the family tradition by joining the Army.
He went through the Army’s elite Ranger School, learned to pilot helicopters and reached the rank of captain. In 1965 Kristofferson was offered a position teaching English – he was enthralled by the works of poet William Blake – at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, but he turned it down in order to head to Nashville.