Music icon’s attempt to woo wife backfired

Kris Kristofferson was at a local gym when a young woman caught his eye. He devised a plan to strike up a conversation with her but things didn’t go exactly to plan.
It was the early 1980s and the country music singer, whose star as a Hollywood leading man was on the rise, had locked eyes with Lisa, a law student. He asked to borrow a piece of equipment she was using.
This year, they marked 41 years of marriage, now sadly separated by his death.
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In tribute to the multi-Grammy award winning music legend, here is a look back at the story between the A Star is Born legend and his great love.
Born Kristoffer Kristofferson, he was a twice divorced father when he met Lisa.
Family was his priority, with finding new love low on his list. At least this is what he told her when Lisa suggested the pair go for a run together.
“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’,” he told the Irish Independent in 2004. 
Lisa was unfazed by his words. In that moment, all she wanted was to go for a run.
“She has been a real blessing, because we both value the family as much as anybody could,” the Highwayman singer said.
Kristofferson and Meyers married in an intimate ceremony at Pepperdine University chapel in 1983. It was the third marriage for him and Meyer’s first.
The Bobby McGee singer wed his longtime girlfriend, Fran Beer, in 1960.
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At the time he was an Oxford University graduate who would go on to join the military and harbour a dream to become a musician.
He and Beer welcomed two children together, a daughter Tracy and a son Kris.
Their relationship reportedly faulted over Kristofferson’s need to pursue a music career.
By the late 1960s, his songs had been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. Kristofferson was making a name for himself.
He was soon linked to the first queen of rock and roll, Janis Joplin. It was a tumultuous relationship between the two Texans.
“I dug her, but I had itchy feet,” he said. 
“I’d get up intending to get out, and in she comes with the early morning drinks and pretty soon you’re wasted enough and you don’t care about leaving.” 
The pair remained entangled in each other’s lives until Joplin’s death by overdose in October 1970.
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Kristofferson met his second wife, American singer Rita Coolidge, in 1972.
They had met a year before on a plane ride from Los Angeles to Memphis, Texas. 
“I like to say that it was ‘love at first flight,’ ” Coolidge told People in 2016. “We literally talked all the way to Memphis.”
Kristofferson was due to fly on to Nashville, but instead got off the plane with Coolidge.
“Before we went to sleep that night we’d picked out a name for our first child,” she recalled. “There was no doubt in my mind that we were going to be together.”
Kristofferson and Coolidge had a daughter, Casey, together. They separated and divorced in 1980.
During his more than four decades marriage to Meyers, the couple welcomed five children together – Jesse, Jody, Johnny, Blake and Kelly Marie.
Kristofferson and Meyers lived a quiet, low profile life together in Maui in Hawaii.
It was here, surrounded by his family, that Kristofferson peacefully passed away on Saturday. He was 88.
No cause of death has been made public.
“It is with a heavy heart that we share the news our husband/father/grandfather, Kris Kristofferson, passed away peacefully on Saturday, September 28 at home,” a family statement issued to People read.
“We’re all so blessed for our time with him. Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”
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