How A Star is Born nearly starred Elvis Presley

Kris Kristofferson made the role of Barbra Streisand’s hard-drinking lover his own. But he certainly wasn’t the first choice for the part…

When the death of the actor and musician Kris Kristofferson was announced, Barbra Streisand, his co-star from the 1976 version of A Star is Born, offered warm tribute to him.
“The first time I saw Kris performing at the Troubadour club in L.A. I knew he was something special,” she wrote on X/Twitter. “Barefoot and strumming his guitar, he seemed like the perfect choice for a script I was developing, which eventually became A Star Is Born.”
What Streisand did not mention was that the production process for the picture was one of the most tortuous in Hollywood history. There had already been two earlier versions of the story made, one with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in 1937 and another with James Mason and Judy Garland in 1954. Both stuck to the same basic storyline – a famous male star falls in love with an aspiring ingénue, and as her fame grows, his declines, until she eventually eclipses him and he kills himself.
The Streisand version updated the story to the field of rock music. She would play Esther Hoffman, a singer with ambitions to hit the big time. Meanwhile, the role of her mentor/lover would be a self-destructive but brilliantly talented rock star, John Norman Howard.
There was no shortage of charismatic, doomed figures in the music industry in the mid-Seventies to play the role. Her friend and former school classmate Neil Diamond was considered, but eventually passed on it. There was then the suggestion of Marlon Brando, who had already been approached to play the part in the 1954 picture. But although he possessed the requisite brooding charisma, he was both out of shape and no great singer. Instead, Streisand and Peters decided to approach the man who, by that point in his career, was living his own version of John Norman Howard’s life – none other than the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll himself, Elvis Presley.
When Streisand and the film’s producer Jon Peters visited Las Vegas in order to meet Elvis, it was with trepidation. He had not acted in a film since 1969’s Change of Habit, and the forty-year old singer was out of shape and overweight. Yet he was still Elvis, and Peters, especially, idolised him. The producer commented, “He told us he’d always wanted to work with Barbra, which is unusual. Most performers don’t – she’s too strong.”  
The idea was that a role like this could rehabilitate him and bring him to a new audience. The initial negotiations, though, didn’t go to plan. Streisand recalled:
[We] went backstage to meet with Elvis and his manager, Colonel [Tom] Parker. It took Elvis a while to appear, and when he finally walked in, he apologised. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but I have a problem. I’ve got this girl flying around in my plane right now” . . . he literally had her circling overhead . . . “and I can’t decide whether I should let her down. What do you think?” I said, “Why is she up there? “She kept talking and talking while I’m getting ready to go onstage and she was making me crazy.” “Let her down,” I told him, “and tell her the truth. Explain that you need some quiet time to yourself before you perform. She’ll understand that.”
It was sage advice. Elvis, however, would be dead a couple of years later, a bloated shadow of his former self, without ever acting again. He may have accepted the role, and was initially keen to do so. But Parker made a series of unreasonable demands, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the project. He asked that Elvis be top billed, paid a vast sum of money and, most problematically, that the concept of the film changed. He insisted that the script be rewritten to suggest that the lead character’s career was still thriving, rather than being in decline, because he was worried that Elvis playing a washed-up figure on screen would only have led to speculation about his own career difficulties. So The King never got the role.
Elvis may, indeed, have left the building, but with Diamond and Brando also out of the picture, Streisand and Peters had to look elsewhere, and Kristofferson’s name came up, after what appeared to be another fruitless Hollywood search.   Kristofferson had begun his singing career in the late Sixties, but at this point was more highly regarded as a songwriter than a rock star in his own right. Perhaps to this end, he had begun an acting career a few years before, and had already worked with Sam Peckinpah (twice) and Martin Scorsese. Unfortunately, the director picked for A Star is Born, Frank Pierson, was no Scorsese or Peckinpah, and Streisand and Kristofferson both detested him. 
Streisand’s relationship with her co-star was a more complex one. The actor was drinking heavily at the time, perhaps as a Method response to the character, and she later wrote “[This] made working with him very difficult.  All I could do was let go and accept the situation. And I’m so glad for both of us that what he did give me was damn good.” And although his Howard looked a lot like Jim Morrison, the doomed lead singer of The Doors, Kristofferson denied it was such a conscious homage, saying “I don’t think I ever met Morrison. A lot of people said we looked alike – shirts off, beards – but that washed-up rock star was more about me.”
He and Streisand had the tricky task of appearing to fall in love under the watchful and jealous gaze of her all-powerful producer boyfriend, and so the relationship remained a purely professional one. Yet their chemistry on screen is electrifying. Streisand remembered of her co-star: “The part of John Norman Howard seemed tailor-made for him. He almost didn’t have to act. He was a musician, a songwriter, a poet . . . with an aching vulnerability that showed in his eyes. God, he was attractive… so beautiful . . . with perfect white teeth . . . and barefoot. Incredibly sexy.”
It has often been rumoured that the two had an affair on set. Streisand has never confirmed or denied this, but teasingly alluded to there being more than a professional interest in her memoir, saying “He gave me hickeys on my neck. Thank God I had a two-piece bathing suit by Rudi Gernreich with a turtleneck top to hide them.”
The film was a huge commercial success but critically reviled, with the Los Angeles Times film reviewer writing “A half-hour in, I wrote ‘a star is boring’ in my notes, and was not later persuaded I’d been wrong.” Streisand’s singing was praised but little else was. It did not matter. Both Kristofferson and Streisand won Golden Globes for Best Actor and Actress in a Musical, and Evergreen would win an Oscar for Best Song.
And, unlike many of Streisand’s other co-stars, the two would remain on good terms off-screen, too. Kristofferson joined her on stage in Hyde Park as a special guest in 2019 to sing the other main love song from the picture, Lost Inside Of You.
We may never know the true story of what happened between Kristofferson and Streisand off-set, but whatever occurred, the genuinely warm relationship between the two suggested that the turbulent casting process was worth it in the end. The combustible chemistry between the two singer-actors remains a cinematic highlight – and the film, in all its Seventies glory, stands as a fitting tribute to its late star.
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