The eyes are unusual, palest blue around a dark blue centre. The face is weatherbeaten, like a sailor's. Yet the moustache is tamed, clipped. As for the voice, it's barely audible. There's something about Kris Kristofferson, his face, his manner, that doesn't add up, until you know his history, a history that finds resonance in his latest film, Merchant Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, and the reason we meet for a rare interview. But time is short and Kristofferson is like a ball of string with too many ends, the problem is where to start the unravelling.
One end of the Kristofferson tangle is the songwriter: composer of some of the most affecting country songs ever recorded - Help Me Make It Through the Night, Me and Bobby McGee and Sunday Morning Coming Down. It's when you hear that his inspiration for Me and Bobby McGee was the Fellini's film La Strada, that the standard image of the country singer goes awry. He's not sure if he saw La Strada first in Los Angeles or Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, 10 years ahead of Bill Clinton.
The man who in his middle years would become the archetypal Hollywood hellraiser ("I've been in jail. I've had a lot of wild times. I never regretted it. But I don't miss it.") was born in 1935 into a solid middle-class background. His father was a general in the US airforce and fought in both the second World War and Korea. And, like his father, the young Kristofferson was destined for the military.
"I was already in the army by the time I went to Oxford. I had my commission when I graduated from college in the States and they deferred my active duty because of the Rhodes scholarship, and I had my tour of duty to do after I got out." This proved to be teaching English at West Point.
Yet since the age of 11 he had been writing and singing songs. ("It was just the way I expressed myself.") He knew writing of some sort would be his future, although he had "no idea how he was going to make a living at it". Although he is now a committed pacifist ("and a patriot, although some people wouldn't agree with that") he remembers army service as a good time. He had a band, he was married and started a family.
From West Point to Nashville was, admits Kristofferson, "a difficult jump, because there were expectations that went with being a Rhodes Scholar". While his father was supportive, "He said he didn't really understand what I was doing, but understood that I needed to do it". There was, however, an acrimonious split with his mother.
He first visited Nashville on leave, armed only with an introduction to a music publisher, a relative of his platoon commander. "I probably gravitated towards Nashville because of the importance of words in country music at the time as opposed to pop. The fact that I turned up in uniform made it a little difficult for a while. A lot of them called me captain, and I'm sure they thought I was insane. But I just fell in love with the whole life - they're exciting people. I figured if I couldn't make it as a songwriter, at least I'd have so much material for fiction, that I could write a great book about it."
To make ends meet Kristofferson worked as a janitor in Columbia's Nashville recording studios, which is how he first met Bob Dylan - "emptying ashtrays on his Blonde On Blonde recording session". Later he took to flying helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico on the off-shore oil rigs alternating week by week with "pitching my stuff up in Nashville".
Not surprisingly his marriage went down the pan. "I had come from a pretty conservative background, then suddenly I was free. Hanging out with song writers, they would go three days and nights at a time without sleeping even. Exciting for me, but horrible for my wife. The music became a kind of wall between us. So my family and I parted after about four years. Then I was free to sow all the wild oats I wanted to. The next thing I knew I was performing in movies with beautiful women. In the bathtub with Barbra [Streisand], and just having a wonderful time. It was like living in a fantasy world, for a kid. But I was grown up. Ten years older at least than people at my level in songwriting or performing."
He had been handed the script of his first film, Cisco Pike in a folk club in Los Angeles. "It was a hangout for a lot of people, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, the guys that later were the Eagles. Dennis Hopper had just blown the studio system askew with Easy Rider which was full of Dylan songs and that kind of music and I think they were looking for new blood. Anyway, Harry Dean Stanton, who used to sit there and sing Mexican songs, gave me a script. I didn't even know he was an actor. I'd been given other scripts, but this one of Harry Dean's was one I felt I could do. The role was a drug dealer, but he was an ex-musician and although I couldn't even roll a joint at the time, I could identify with his problems."
Although Cisco Pike, released in 1971, seems to have disappeared from the archives - Kristofferson has never seen it screened on TV - it was the perfect calling card: a soundtrack mainly made up of his own music and a cast that included Gene Hackman, Karen Black, Viva and Stanton. But it also defined Kristofferson's on-screen persona of raw, country-boy vulnerability for the next 25 years. What followed was succession of high-profile movies, made by high-profile directors. First came Paul Mazurzky with Blume In Love, then Martin Scorcese with Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More followed by Sam Peckinpah with Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
"To be with Sam and get to play Billy the Kid and to have a gunfight with Jack Elam and get to play poker with all those great guys who were in every great western was a young boy's fantasy. But I didn't appreciate it then, not as much as I would now." Then there was the mainstream success of A Star Is Born, with Barbra Streisand. The bubble burst, however, in 1980 with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.
Kris Kristofferson is uncomfortable talking about himself, except in terms of self-deprecating parody, but he takes wing in praise or defence of others. The reason Cimino's folly/masterpiece, failed, believes Kristofferson, was not artistic but political. "It was an attack on the whole way of making movies after Coppola. Even before it was finished they were calling it Apocalypse Next. Michael was trying to make a work of art, and every dollar was spent on the film. It was a picture of the downside of the American dream, not politically correct in the Reagan/Bush era. So the critics savaged it but the murder was blamed on him, a man who two years before had won two Oscars."
But Heaven's Gate did for Kristofferson's career as surely as it did for Cimino's. Both became unbankable. 1980 was a terrible year on every front. Kristofferson's second wife, the country singer Rita Coolidge, left him, his agent died, his record company went bankrupt and he lost his recording contract with Polygram. For the next 15 years his screen career became the equivalent of day-time TV, a succession of cameos and made-for-video movies. And so it might have continued if not for John Sayles's inspirational casting of Kristofferson as the racist Texan sheriff at the centre of Lone Star.
"I feel so much gratitude to John for having the imagination to even think of me in that role. I asked him, why did he think of me for this man who was everything that I've taught my children not to be? And he said, you either cast to type or against type."
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is similarly inspirational casting: this time as close to type as could he imagined, albeit Kristofferson as he's never been seen on film before. The screenplay is based on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of James Jones, author of the great anti-war novel From Here To Eternity, and recounts her unconventional ex-pat childhood in Paris in the 1960s.
"As soon as I got the script, I was convinced I was perfect for the role. I had so many things in common, many points of contact, ex-soldier, a guy who considers himself a writer, father of young children, a real relationship with his family." Not to mention the drinking and the poker.
Kristofferson's relationship with his new family is equally close and committed. He met his third wife, Lisa Meyer, 15 years ago, when she was a law student: throughout the interview proud stories of his children come tumbling out - he has eight, three from the early years and "five little ones".
"There are so many parallels, particularly being an old father - I know from my own life it's a lot different, and probably would have been a lot different for James if he'd had children when he still had to prove that he was a writer. It's difficult being an artist. You have to go through a period of being pretty selfish and that's makes you a lousy family man. Because, like I said, following my heart to be a writer at that time took me out of the house. Now it might take me back into the house."
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries will be shown at the Cork Film Festival on Wednesday night and it opens at the IFC in Dublin next Friday