Country music and Hollywood legend Kris Kristofferson has “passed away peacefully” aged 88, according to his family, who were with him when he died.
Family was everything to Kristofferson, who had eight children, seven grandchildren and three wives in total. “I feel nothing but gratitude for being this old and still above ground, living with the people I love," he told NPR back in 2013. "I've got eight kids, and a wife that puts up with everything I do, and keeps me out of trouble."
Three really was the magic number when it came to Kristofferson’s luck in love. That’s not to say his other relationships weren’t substantial - he was married to his first wife, Fran Beer, for nine years, from 1960 to 1969, and his second, Rita Coolidge, for eight years, from 1973 to 1980.
But it’s his 41 year long relationship with Lisa Meyers that proved to be the real love story. And it started in an unlikely place. While Kristofferson’s other relationships had tangible links to showbiz, with Frances Beer a budding actress and Rita Coolidge a musician, his meeting with Meyers was much more up to chance. Chance, and shared gym equipment.
It started when Kristofferson was fresh out of his divorce from Coolidge, bruised and battered by the loss of two failed marriages.
“At the time, I was gun-shy about any relationship heavier than a one-night stand. The road had been my escape, going out and pouring it all into performing,” the A Star is Born actor told People Magazine in 1998. “[But] as my family started getting bigger, it finally beat its way into my consciousness: ‘Wake up, man. This is what really matters.’”
So when he saw Meyers, then a law student at Pepperdine University, at a Malibu gym in 1982, he devised a plan to speak to her: by asking for a piece of gym equipment.
It worked, but he needed to come clean about his family, which already included three children. He asked Meyers if she wanted to go on a run together one day, but also divulged information about his family life. “I was a bachelor father at the time and I told her: 'I take a little girl to school and I pick her up at the end of the day and then we go do whatever she wants to do and I haven't got room for anything else,’” Kristofferson told the Irish Independent in 2004.
Luckily, Meyers was unphased and the pair tied the knot within a year, as part of an intimate ceremony at her university chapel in 1983. Meyers graduated, and went on to practice law as an attorney. They shared a life together in Malibu, but moved to Maui, in Hawaii, to raise their children, of which they had five in total, Jesse, 40, Jody, 39, Johnny, 36, Kelly, 34, and Blake, 30.
Kristofferson has since called this relocation to Hawaii, “The best move I ever made.” He and Meyers led a quiet existence in Maui, where the pair would spend their time going on daily walks and Kristofferson would mow their lawn. “I get up, walk with my wife, but really I don’t have any duties to do once I mow the lawn [laughs]. I got a lot of lawn to mow,” said a 79-year-old Kristofferson in a 2013 interview with Las Vegas Magazine.
Kristofferson was misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the 2010s, only for it to be discovered in 2016 that he was actually battling Lyme disease, though he still struggled with memory loss. He was still working as an actor and musician, right up until 2022, and Meyers was his most loyal advocate. “We understand Kris’ deficits in spatial awareness and short-term memory loss and we laugh about it all the time,” Meyers told HuffPost in 2016. “The more we can get Kris to laugh, the healthier he is. Being on the road, the laughter, the music. It’s great medicine.”
When not working, Kristofferson’s quiet Maui life with Meyers was a constant, and something he always mentioned in interviews. In that same Las Vegas Magazine interview, he said of his “next accomplishment”: “Aw, listen, I’ve had so much blessing, so much reward for my life that I want to stay right where I am, which is on an island with no neighbours and 180 degrees of empty horizon. It’s a beautiful view… shit, I can stay here for the rest of my life.” And that he did, with Meyers by his side.
