The singer, who notably inspired Bob Dylan and played in the cinema alongside Barbra Streisand (“A Star is Born”, 1976), died on Saturday at the age of 88, his family announced on Sunday. “Kris Kristofferson passed away peacefully on Saturday at his home” in Hawaii at the age of 88, his relatives said last Sunday on his Facebook page. “When you see a rainbow, know that it is the one that smiles on us all.” Winner of a Golden Globe in 1976 for his role alongside Barbra Streisand in “A Star is Born”, Kris Kristofferson also distinguished himself in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” by Sam Peckinpah in 1973. Author notably of the classics “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” (1969) and “Me and Bobby McGee” (1970), covered by Janis Joplin, Kristofferson was a prominent country singer-songwriter, like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, with whom he formed The Highwaymen. Winner of several Grammy Awards, he joined the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004.
Born June 22, 1936 in Brownsville, Texas, Kris Kristofferson first embraced a military career, like his father, before settling in Nashville, the Mecca of country music, writing notably “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down » for Johnny Cash. “There is Nashwille before Kris, and Nashville after Kris. Because he changed everything,” said Bob Dylan, quoted by Kristofferson’s site. The singer with the hoarse voice, who throughout his life nurtured a passion for the English poet William Blake, continued to perform regularly on stage until his artistic retirement at the age of 84, in 2021. Kris Kristofferson married Lisa Meyers in 1983 They own and live in their home in Los Flores Canyon in Malibu, California, as well as a residence in Hana, on the island of Maui. He experienced various medical problems over several decades and underwent successful surgery in 1999, but suffered from 2004 to 2015 from what would eventually be diagnosed as Lyme disease (transmitted by hard tick bites), while He was initially and incorrectly diagnosed as suffering from an early form of Alzheimer’s disease. The circumstances under which Kris Kristofferson contracted the disease are not well established, but it is suspected that he caught it while filming a film in the forests of Vermont in 2002. According to his wife, the correct diagnosis resulted screening for autoimmune and Alzheimer’s-type diseases, and still according to her, her husband underwent treatment in California in 2016, provided by a specialist “who added intramuscular injections of antibiotics to Kris’s protocol”. Kristofferson has eight children from three marriages.
