American country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor Kris Kristofferson, who was also a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma, has died.
Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.
McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given.
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Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such classics standards as Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, Help Me Make it Through the Night, For the Good Times and Me and Bobby McGee.
Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning For the Good Times or Janis Joplin belting out Me and Bobby McGee.
Kristofferson, who could recite works by English 18th-century poet William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music.
With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.
“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” 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.”
As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas.
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