Val Kilmer, the charisma-oozing leading man who lost himself portraying such tormented, self-loathing characters as Jim Morrison, gunslinger Doc Holliday and Batman during his all-too-brief career, died Tuesday. He was 65.
Kilmer, who came to fame for playing the competitive naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky alongside Tom Cruise in Tony Scott’s 1986 mega box-office hit Top Gun, died of pneumonia in Los Angeles, his daughter, actress Mercedes Kilmer, told The New York Times.
Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015, and Val, a stirring documentary about his life that premiered at Cannes in July 2021, showed him needing a breathing tube.
His death was announced as the actor was meant to be arriving for a rare red carpet appearance at the Beverly Hills Film Festival on Tuesday night. “It was a shock to find this out. We had just confirmed Val to attend the west coast premiere of American Badass: A Michael Madsen Retrospective this past weekend,” Nino Simone, founder and president of the Beverly Hills Film Festival, said on Wednesday.
Raised in the San Fernando Valley in the shadow of Hollywood, Kilmer also was known for his meaty performances as Robert De Niro’s nasty henchman in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995); as Marlon Brando’s insane assistant in John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996); as the suave crook Simon Templar in Phillip Noyce’s The Saint (1997); and as the homosexual detective Gay Perry in Shane Black’s tribute to film noir, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005).
Kilmer also impressively channeled Elvis Presley in Scott’s True Romance (1993), written by Quentin Tarantino, and porn star/cocaine addict John Holmes in Wonderland (2003).
He was married to British actress Joanne Whalley from 1988 until their divorce in 1996. They met while working together on Willow and wed months later.
In Oliver Stone‘s The Doors (1991), Kilmer, with long brown hair and skintight black leathers, was eerily realistic as Morrison, the L.A. band’s iconic frontman who succumbed to drugs in 1971 at age 27. The actor took months to prepare for the role, and he recorded his baritone voice against the backing of original Doors master tapes for the film.
The soundtrack “combines Morrison’s original vocals and new vocals by Val Kilmer so seamlessly that there is never, not even for a moment, the sensation that Kilmer is not singing everything we hear,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review.
“That illusion is strengthened by Kilmer’s appearance. He looks so uncannily like Jim Morrison that we feel this is not a case of casting, but of possession. The performance is the best thing in the movie — and since nearly every scene centers on Morrison, that is not small praise. Val Kilmer has always had a remarkable talent, which until now has been largely overlooked.”
Kilmer also was quite compelling with his scene-stealing turn as the doomed Holliday, a sickly alcoholic who’s quick on the draw, in the modern Western classic Tombstone (1993).
“He works harder than most actors to make it look believable,” Tombstone director George Cosmatos told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “He’s in the ranks of the great actors in America like [Al] Pacino or De Niro.”
Kilmer then took the cowl vacated by Michael Keaton to star as the moody Caped Crusader in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995). The film raked in $336 million at the global box office, and only Toy Story grossed more that year.
“For me, Val Kilmer was the best Batman,” Schumacher once said, even though they reportedly clashed on the set. (Frankenheimer also didn’t get along with Kilmer; after Dr. Moreau, he said that the two things he would never do again were “climb Mount Everest and work with Val Kilmer again.”)
On Batman Forever, “Everything was different about this job than I’d experienced before,” the actor told Entertainment Tonight in 1995. “The size of the character and how strange it was that Michael Keaton had decided not to do it — I just said yes, without reading the script.”
When he and Warner Bros. couldn’t agree to terms, Kilmer was one and done as Batman, opting not to return for Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997) as George Clooney stepped in.
Val Edward Kilmer, part Cherokee, Irish, German and Swedish, was born on New Year’s Eve 1959 in the L.A. suburb of Chatsworth. His father was an aerospace engineer and real estate developer and his mother a housewife — they would end up divorcing when he was 9 — and he had one older brother, one younger.
Wesley, his younger sibling, suffered an epileptic seizure and drowned in a swimming pool at the family home that his father had bought from Western movie legends Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. At the time, Kilmer was about to leave to study acting at Juilliard in New York; he was 17 and the youngest person to be admitted to the school’s drama division.
“It was quite an emotional time for me, and in a way, the extremely high standards and the activity of the school I’m sure were good for me, because I was forced to really challenge myself about my very life, you know — what I believe about life and death,” he said in a 2005 interview.
At Juilliard, he co-wrote How It All Began, a play based on the true story of a West German radical, and it wound up being directed by Des McAnuff and produced by Joseph Papp for The Public Theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1983’s Slab Boys, also featuring Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.
In his first film, Kilmer starred as rockabilly teen idol Nick Rivers in the daffy spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) from Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. (He also was dating Cher around this time.)
He made an ABC Afterschool Special called One Too Many, in which he played a teenage alcoholic alongside Mare Winningham, then portrayed a lazy laser-technology whiz kid in Real Genius (1985), from director Martha Coolidge.
When Scott approached him for Top Gun, Kilmer said he wasn’t interested. “I told Tony at the meeting, ‘Frankly, I don’t like this.’ I loved what I’d seen of his work, but I just didn’t want to do that movie,” he recalled in the Times interview. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, your hair will look great.’ He thought that would make a difference. He was infectious that way.”
For many fans, Iceman was his signature role: “People talk about it pretty much every time I go to an airport,” he said.
Kilmer returned for the 2022 sequel, and his health issues were evident. His brief scenes in the movie, David Rooney wrote in THR‘s review, generated “resonant pathos. There’s reciprocal warmth, even love, in a scene between Iceman and [Cruise’s] Maverick that acknowledges the characters’ hard-won bond as well as the rivalry that preceded it, with gentle humor.”
Kilmer also provided the voice of K.I.T.T. in a new version of TV’s Knight Rider in 2008-09; played opposite Nicolas Cage in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009); portrayed the bad guy Cunth for laughs in MacGruber (2010); starred for Francis Ford Coppola in Twixt (2011); was a creepy building superintendent in The Super (2018); and directed, wrote and starred as Mark Twain in Citizen Twain, a one-man show that he brought to stages around the country and then to the big screen.
In 2011, Kilmer sold off most of his 6,000-acre ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had lived for decades. He told THR in December 2017 that his faith as a Christian Scientist helped him deal with his cancer ordeal.
Survivors include his son, Jack, an actor as well.
