By Kate Lahey and Will Dunham
Actor Val Kilmer, best known for his roles in Batman Forever, Top Gun and The Doors, has died in Los Angeles aged 65, The New York Times has reported.
Kilmer’s daughter, Mercedes, said the cause of death was pneumonia, the Times reported. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she said.
Kilmer in a scene from Val, a documentary about the actor.
The California-born actor trained at Juilliard and earned a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy.
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.”
Kilmer visits the United Nations headquarters in New York to promote the 17 Sustainable Development Goals initiative in 2019. Credit: Getty Images
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 Top Gun (1986), playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, and decades later appeared alongside Cruise again in the 2022 sequel Top Gun: Maverick.
The official Top Gun movie account paid tribute to Kilmer’s career on X, saying his “indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations”.
Top Gun was his big break, but a movie he said he initially did not want to do.
“I thought the script was silly, and I disliked the warmongering in the film,” he said in the 2021 documentary Val. Once on Tony Scott’s set, though, he was energised by the film and for the rest of his life, he said: “I will be called ‘Iceman’ by every pilot at every airport I ever go to.”
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 they divorced in 1996.
One of his most challenging roles came in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) in which he played Jim Morrison, the charismatic and ultimately doomed lead singer of the influential rock band.
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 instalment in the Batman series.
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.”
With Reuters, AP
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