Kris Kristofferson Was the Gravelly Voice of a Generation — and the Real Deal Onscreen

Let’s say that, in January of 1972, you had never heard a note of Kris Kristofferson’s music. You didn’t know the former helicopter pilot and Rhodes scholar had written “Me and Bobby McGee,” which Janis Joplin had turned into her signature song. Or “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which he gave to Johnny Cash after allegedly landing a whirlybird in the Man in Black’s backyard. (Print the legend.) Or “Once More With Feeling,” “For the Good Times,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” or a number of other notable country songs that other artists had turned into chart-topping hits. Somehow, you had missed his 1970 debut album, which quickly established him as the hottest new wordsmith on the Music Row block. The only thing you knew about the future Country Music Hall of Famer was the upside-down reflection you saw of him in a puddle, just a scruffy hippie with kind blue eyes and a babyface grin walking down the mean streets of Los Angeles with a guitar.

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Whether or not this was the same guitar that Kristofferson wrote “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again,” the single off his second album The Silver Tongued Devil and I, was irrelevant. Regardless, this song playing over the opening credits of Cisco Pike, the film about a former dope dealer — played by Kris — who is trying to put his past behind him yet, thanks to Gene Hackman’s hard-ass cop, still ends up in deep shit. All you know is that the guy onscreen who’s ambling toward a music store, where he’ll attempt to pawn his instrument to owner Roscoe Lee Browne for some quick cash, radiates a life hard-lived before he’s even said a word. When Kristofferson does finally speak, regaling Browne with tales of a recent drug bust and reminiscing about old gigs, his raspy baritone confirms that this guy is intimately familiar with filterless cigarettes, empty bottles, and late nights bleeding into early mornings. There’s a hint of desperation in his pitch. Then he packs up his six-string, says goodbye and leaves, slouching toward the beach.

Kristofferson, who died Saturday at the age of 88, was already an established singer-songwriter when he fell into the moving-picture business by accident — his only real exposure to the film industry had been hanging out in Peru with Dennis Hopper during the making of the director’s follow-up to Easy Rider, a druggy disaster presciently named The Last Movie . (Hopper wanted him to score it.) According to Kristofferson , he’d been approached by The Godfather casting director Fred Roos after an early gig at the Troubadour, about playing a role in the upcoming road movie Two Lane Blacktop . Kristofferson ended up walking out of the audition. He wasn’t an actor, for fuck’s sake. Thanks, but no thanks.

Still, the producers offered him the lead role in Cisco Pike . And while he claimed not to be a fan of the movie or his performance, this unsung classic of ’70s downer cinema is a great introduction to someone who claimed not to be an actor yet turned out to be one hell of a movie star. Five minutes in, you already get a feel for who this title character is: a world-weary member of the counterculture that’s clearly in full Sunday-morning-coming-down mode, a stoic hipster trying to hang on to his dignity, someone who’s no stranger to temporary bliss or permanent cynicism. The kind of dude, in other words, who might have just strolled out of a Kris Kristofferson song.

Had this rough gem of a New Hollywood crime drama been the only time he dabbled in filmmaking, Kristofferson would have been just another musician whose stage presence and persona were momentarily put to good use on celluloid. (See: the guys who ended up starring in Two Lane Blacktop. ) Instead, this attempt for the studios to cash in on the youth market one more time kicked off a side career that remains as impressive, if not as extensive, as the songwriter’s day job. For the next 50 years or so, the rangy country-music legend would gift the movies with a plainspoken honesty, a sense of hard-earned authenticity, and a gravel-voiced gravitas that informed his drifters, bearded dreamboats, rebels, and, later, authority figures that could be paternal or psychotic, depending on which side the flipped coin landed.

Cisco Pike, Kristofferson noted in our 1974 profile of him, was what got him a role in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western that cast Kris as Billy; he was also the one who convinced Bob Dylan to take a supporting part as a character named Alias. Once again, the camera is capturing something in his volatile gunslinger that makes up for the little screen experience or self-admitted lack of technical chops. Watch the affectionate look on Kristofferson’s face when someone asks him why he doesn’t kill James Coburn’s Garrett, who’s just become sheriff, and he replies, “He’s my friend. ” Check out the chilling way he impassively stares down a pious jail guard before he shoots him full of buckshot made of dimes. Listen to the way he lyrically spins the line, “I heard God’s fast… but I’d have to go up before him myself before I bet on him.” Prepping for a fatalistic gunfight, his Billy sings an impromptu song about everywhere he’s been, from “Arizona [to] Colorado, with your daughter.” Long before he was on the Mount Rushmore of Outlaw Country, Kristofferson played a genuine outlaw and somehow made the man more mesmerizing than the myth.

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The movie became a victim of the studio’s cowardice and Peckinpah’s maverick instability, resulting in it being sliced and diced down to a 1973 theatrical version that couldn’t have made less sense. Once the film was restored to its complete version in 1988, it was rightfully hailed as a truly great ’70s Western — and Kristofferson’s performance played heavily into its new cult status. Thankfully, Martin Scorsese had seen an early preview of Peckinpah’s original cut, which led to him casting Kristofferson in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. A bold take on the story of a single mother working in a diner and trying to raise her son, Scorsese’s drama introduces the singer’s stoic hippie dream guy late in the game, after Ellen Burstyn’s Alice has given up on love. His character represents a second chance, in the form of a sex symbol that reads as equal parts sensitive and hypermasculine. “We got into some interesting situations where people wanted us out of the buildings where we were shooting,” the director recalled to Richard Schickel. “He would always say, ‘Having any trouble, Marty?’ And then, they’d say, ‘Well, for you, Kris, we’ll do it.’ He just had a calming influence on all of us.”

You wouldn’t call the influence he had on folks who saw Barbra Streisand’s version of A Star Is Born (1976) “calming, exactly — his hormone-spiking superstar John Norman Howard is meant to represent everything good, bad and ugly about ’70s stadium-rock excess. There’s so much magnetism coming off the screen that you’re surprised people didn’t lose their keys and their fillings. Streisand and boyfriend/producer Jon Peters had gone after Marlon Brando, Neil Diamond, and Elvis Presley for the role of the doomed singer who falls as his new discovery-slash-romantic interest rises; it’s now impossible to think of anyone else playing the Me Decade interpretation of this archetype, much less gracing the now iconic shirtless poster. Or, for that matter, convincingly riding a motorcycle onto a concert stage and burning rubber: “Just giving them what they want!”

Star represented the pinnacle of his pop cultural ubiquity. A slew of vastly different projects, ranging from Semi-Tough and Heaven’s Gate — yes, that Heaven’s Gate — to Big Top Pee-wee and the underrated Trouble in Mind followed. A generation of arthouse moviegoers and Dads Who Love Anything Cowboy-Related know Kristofferson as the corrupt, cold-blooded sheriff in John Sayles’ brilliant 1996 neo-Western Lone Star, in what may be the most chilling role Kristofferson ever played. A generation of superhero-cinema fanatics remember him as Abraham Whistler, the mentor to Wesley Snipes vampire hunter (and vampire-slash-hunter) Blade in the Blade films. He turned into an actor who knew exactly how to his use his realer-than-real offscreen reputation to radiate a dead seriousness or, when needed, lend that same imposing sense of filterless, zero-fucks-given attitude into pure camp. Everyone from Ethan Hawke to the creators of Dolphin Tale 2 knew what they were getting when they got Kristofferson: The real deal.

So while everyone mourns the loss of Kristofferson the Divinely Gifted Songwriter today, and pours one out for the man who listened to the devil accuse him of being a penniless fuck-up and replied “You’ve been reading my mail,” we ask that they save a few drops for Kristofferson the Movie Star, Kristofferson the Character Actor, and Kristofferson the Screen Legend. To go back and watch those dozens of performances, from the jaded hippies to the kindly graybeards, is to see an artist who was too big for one medium. Music was his spouse and the movies were his side piece. But he never delivered anything less than the truth no matter what he did.

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