By Will Dunham
– Val Kilmer, who starred in films such as “Top Gun,” “The Doors,” and “Batman Forever” while earning a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy for his intensity and temperament, has died, the New York Times reported. He was 65.
The cause of death was pneumonia, the paper said, citing his daughter Mercedes Kilmer. The actor had lived with poor health for years due to throat cancer.
The California-born, Juilliard-trained actor was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men in the 1990s, having made his film debut in the 1984 spy spoof “Top Secret!” which won him legions of fans. He rocketed to fame as Tom Cruise’s rival in the smash 1986 hit “Top Gun”, playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky.
“Val Kilmer’s combination of traditional Hollywood glamor boy looks with a complicated, darker and sometimes confronting performance style – I think that’s what made him unique. And I think that’s what will be his true legacy,” said Scott Roxborough, European Bureau Chief at the Hollywood Reporter.
Fellow actor Josh Brolin wrote on Instagram: “You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There’s not a lot left of those.”
One of Kilmer’s most challenging roles came in director Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” in which he played Jim Morrison, the charismatic and ultimately doomed lead singer of the rock band. He sang The Doors’ hits himself in the film.
That role 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”.
Michael Mann, who directed Kilmer in Heat, wrote on Instagram, “I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character. After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”
Over the years, spats with directors and co-stars and a series of high-profile flops dented his career. He gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and sometimes egotistical.
“When certain people criticize 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.”
The noisy, bloated and plodding “Batman Forever”, the third installment in the Batman series in which he succeeded Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader, 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 then clashed with co-star Marlon Brando during the notoriously troubled production of “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” which flopped in 1996.
“There are two things I would never do again in my life,” John Frankenheimer, who directed the movie, said afterward. “I will never climb Mt. Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn’t enough money in the world.”
The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1997 that Kilmer was “a member in good standing of Hollywood’s bad boys club.”
Handsome with light brown hair, Kilmer’s personal life sometimes overshadowed his work. His relationships with various high-profile actresses included singer Cher and model Cindy Crawford. He married his British co-star Joanne Whalley from the 1988 fantasy “Willow”, with whom he had two children before divorcing.
Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatments, as well as a tracheostomy that permanently damaged his voice. He turned to making art.
“It isn’t easy to talk and be understood,” Kilmer wrote on his website in 2022. “I am improving all the time, but am not able to be out in the world the same way I had become accustomed.”
He enjoyed a brief swan-song with the “Top Gun” sequel in 2022, reprising his role as Iceman even though he could barely speak.
“He says one or two words in total in that scene. I think that was a really wonderful way to pay tribute to Val Kilmer and also in some ways to say goodbye to him as an actor,” said Roxborough.
Born in Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 1959, Kilmer began acting in high school and became the youngest student accepted into the drama division of the famed Juilliard School in New York.
“Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life,” Francis Ford Coppola, who directed him in the 2011 horror film “Twixt” , wrote on Instagram.
“He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know.”
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
