Saturdays with the Stars: Kris Kristofferson

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we talked about Sam Elliott, a character actor who managed to carry on the tradition of Ward Bond & Walter Brennan into the New Hollywood era.  This month, our final month of western stars, we're going to look at a first for us-someone arguably better known as a singer & songwriter than as an actor.  But this man did get a period as a leading man in Hollywood, playing opposite actresses like Ellen Burstyn, Barbra Streisand, & Ali MacGraw, some of the biggest names of the 1970's.  This month's star is Kris Kristofferson.

One of the few actors this year that actually came from the stereotypical west, Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, an army brat who moved around frequently because of his father's work in the US Army Air Corps.  Kristofferson has one of the most unusual pre-acting careers of anyone we've done in our five years of Saturdays with the Stars.  He was a Rhodes Scholar, studying English literature at Oxford, and eventually joined the military, being stationed in West Germany during the 1960's.  Rather than become a professor at West Point, though, he went to Nashville (to the shame of his military family) and got into country music through the help of Johnny Cash (allegedly getting his attention by landing a helicopter in Cash's front yard, though Kristofferson & Cash both tell different versions of this story, so it's hard to tell fact from fiction).  Though while with the exception of "Why Me" his songs weren't really successes for him as a singer, Kristofferson wrote massive hits for a number of big stars of the era, including "Help Me Through the Night" (covered by everyone from Gladys Knight to Willie Nelson to, my favorite recording, Sammi Smith), "For the Good Times" (Ray Price), and "Loving Arms" (which he recorded with his second wife, Rita Coolidge).  No song, though, had the kind of shelf life that Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" would have when it was recorded shortly before the death of his then-girlfriend, Janis Joplin.  This would go on to become her most well-known song, and in my opinion, one of the best songs of the 1970's.

Kristofferson's movie career, despite taking a back seat to his music career, honestly was a pretty successful one.  He would achieve leading man status throughout the 1970's, culminating in the massively-successful but critically-maligned A Star is Born with Barbra Streisand (which I have never seen, and we will discuss in all of its messy glory).  Kristofferson would start his career in movies in westerns for Sam Peckinpah (we'll talk about one later this month), and then destroy his acting career with the film that forever killed the Hollywood western as a regularly-produced genre (and the movie that, maybe more than any other, I have been looking forward to seeing for the first time all year): the critically-debated, box office disaster known as Heaven's Gate.