The actor was the real deal, whether as a cherubic psychopath in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, or playing second fiddle to Barbra Streisand in the smash hit A Star Is Born
If Kris Kristofferson had never sung a single note, he would still have been remembered as a terrific screen actor in the Hollywood tradition of tough frontier masculinity, a movie star who worked with Scorsese, Peckinpah, Cimino and Sayles. He had a natural, unforced charisma in the rugged, take-it-or-leave-it tradition of Robert Ryan or John Wayne, or the newer style of Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliott.
Actually, without his recording career, he might have made it higher in the pantheon of screen legends, and his movie work was perhaps one of the casualties of Michael Cimino’s colossal folie de grandeur epic Heaven’s Gate from 1980, which damaged the prestige of everyone involved – Kristofferson was cast, or even miscast, a little against type as a Harvard man and member of the American overclass, who gallantly takes the side of immigrant homesteaders against the cruel cattle barons. It would have been interesting to see him to swap roles with Christopher Walken who was the barons’ hired gun – although Kristofferson made sense of the role’s need for granite integrity.
