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.
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 a perfectionist who was temperamental, intense, 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.”
He made his film debut starring in the 1984 spy spoof Top Secret! before appearing in the goofy comedy Real Genius in 1985.
Kilmer rocketed to stardom as Tom Cruise’s co-star in the 1986 film Top Gun, playing naval aviator Tom (Iceman) Kazansky, and decades later appeared alongside Cruise again in the 2022 sequel Top Gun: Maverick.
Kilmer starred in director Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy film Willow 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 1991 filmThe Doors, 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 instalment 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.”
