If he’d done nothing but write Me and Bobby McGee, and Sunday Morning Coming Down, he would have achieved musical immortality. Since the September 2024 passing of Kris Kristofferson at the age of 88, a great deal has been written about the Air Force brat turned Rhodes scholar turned Air Force helicopter pilot turned Nashville songwriter turned actor.

Most of what’s been written about his acting has centered on A Star is Born. (“Filming with Streisand is an experience which may have cured me of movies,” he said.) Very little was written about the fact that he appeared in more than two dozen Westerns. His film debut was a small role as a minstrel wrangler in Dennis Hopper’s experimental Western, The Last Movie. Two years later he starred as Billy in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. He made two more films for Peckinpah—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Convoy.

The size and scope of his films ran the gamut, from 1980’s studiobankrupting Heaven’s Gate to 2016’s straight-to-video Traded. He played Abraham Lincoln in Tad (1995) and Andrew Jackson in Texas Rising (2015). He was chilling as a corrupt lawman in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996). He made a handful of films co-starring with his musical Highwaymen cohorts, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash—they starred together in a remake of Stagecoach, and Kris played Jesse to Cash’s Frank in The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James.