It's hard to believe the sex symbol for an entire generation—and then some—is pushing 60. According to the latest edition of Who's Who, the man who wrote Me and Bobby McGee and gave it to his then-lover Janis Joplin to record, will turn 59 this June 22.But Kristofferson seems to just get better with age.
"The more I learn, the more I feel the obligation to do more. If you know the truth, or a truth and you don't speak it, then you are part of the lie," he says, blue eyes atwinkle behind his slightly tinted lenses.
And what truths would Kris Kristofferson want you to know?
First, he'd like you to know that Indian activist Peltier, convicted of killing two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1976, is innocent.
He'd like you to know that the FBI and the CIA "killed them all"—meaning every political activist working for positive change in the '60s and '70s—to establish a strangle-hold on the American political system, with their victims including the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.
He'd like you to know that the Declaration of Independence was written by white male land-owners, "because they were the only ones who could vote."
He'd also like you to know that he has no illusions about what his outspoken beliefs may have cost him.
"I haven't had a significant role in a motion picture since Heaven's Gate," he says.
[Ed.: Heaven's Gate, a 1980 film in which Kristofferson starred and which cost $36 million to make, recovered only 3 percent of what it would have taken for it to break even, making it Hollywood's biggest box-office fiasco ever.]
