There was a Kris Kristofferson for everyone. Maybe your favorite is the storyteller who wrote Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” and Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Or maybe you prefer the hirsute heartthrob who anchored the melodramatic bathos of A Star Is Born – y’know, the one that came after James Mason but before Bradley Cooper. Maybe the one who’s closest to your heart is the Kristofferson who had Sinéad O’Connor’s back in a stadium of jeering Dylan fans after she criticized the Pope. Or maybe you just really liked him in Snow Buddies.

It’s not surprising that Kristofferson – who died Saturday at the age of 88 – did so many things, necessarily, but rather that he did them all so well, and without making a big fuss about it. Lots of people are multihyphenates, but he never wore his hyphens on his brown velvet sleeve. He slipped so naturally into each thing he did that you were surprised to find out it wasn’t the only thing he did. I remember the day when I said “Wait, that actor guy also writes iconic songs?”

Everything Kristofferson did, though, he did with his own inimitable style: shaggy, literate, ruggedly masculine, preternaturally weathered, innately sensitive, effortlessly rebellious, perpetually extremely 1970s somehow but in an appealing way. You probably haven’t thought about him in a while, but you kinda miss him now he’s gone – whichever version of him you preferred.