Val Kilmer, the California-born, Juilliard-trained actor who starred in films including Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone and Batman Forever and earned a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy, has died, the New York Times reported. He was 65.
The cause of death was pneumonia, the paper said, citing his daughter Mercedes Kilmer. She said he had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered.
Kilmer was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men in the 1990s before numerous spats with directors and co-stars and a series of flops dented his career. Over the years, Kilmer gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and sometimes egotistical.
“When certain people criticise me for being demanding, I think that’s a cover for something they didn’t do well. I think they’re trying to protect themselves,” Kilmer told the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003.
“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”
He made his film debut starring in the spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) before appearing in the goofy comedy Real Genius (1985). He rocketed to stardom as Tom Cruise’s co-star in the smash 1986 hit Top Gun (1986), playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, and decades later appeared alongside Cruise again in the sequel Top Gun: Maverick.
Kilmer starred in director Ron Howard’s fantasy Willow (1988) and married his British co-star Joanne Whalley, with whom he had two children before divorcing.
One of his most challenging roles came in director Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) in which he played Jim Morrison, the charismatic and ultimately doomed lead singer of the influential rock band The Doors.
To try to persuade Stone to cast him, Kilmer put together an eight-minute video of himself singing and looking like Morrison at various points in his life. Kilmer’s own singing voice is used in the film.
The Doors ushered in the highest-profile years of his career. In the 1993 Western Tombstone, he played Old West gunfighter Doc Holliday. He had two commercial successes in 1995, co-starring with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the crime drama Heat and succeeding Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever, the third installment in the Batman series.
The noisy, bloated and plodding Batman Forever was received tepidly by critics, and Kilmer was upstaged by co-stars Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Kilmer pulled out of the next Batman movie. Director Joel Schumacher called Kilmer “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”
Kilmer was the youngest person ever accepted to New York’s fabled Juilliard school and longed to make serious films.
But he found himself in a series of schlocky blockbusters and expensive flops in the early 2000s.
Chastened by a decade or more of low-budget movies, he was mounting a comeback in the 2010s with a successful stage show about Mark Twain that he hoped to turn into a film, when he was struck by cancer.
Val, a documentary about his stratospheric rise and later fall in Hollywood showed him rasping for air, premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2021.
Kilmer recently returned to movie theaters in 2021 with a cameo reprising his role as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 hit.
