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It almost felt like an April Fools’ Day prank when word hit that actor Val Kilmer, who had been battling throat cancer for years and had just reprised his 1986 role as crack pilot “Iceman” in last year’s hit Top Gun: Maverick, was dead. Sadly, his family made the official announcement that the longtime leading man had indeed passed away on April 1st at 65 due to pneumonia.
Born in Los Angeles in 1959, Kilmer faced twin crises growing up: his parents’ divorce in 1968 and the accidental drowning death of his younger brother Wesley in 1977. Val attended Chatsworth High in L.A. alongside Kevin Spacey and Mare Winningham, whom he dated at the time. After graduating he went to study at New York’s famed Julliard School. His first stage work came in a 1982 off-Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and the following year made his Broadway debut in The Slab Boys, which also starred Kevin Bacon, Jackie Earle Haley, and Sean Penn. It was his commitment to the play, in fact, that led the actor to turn down a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 YA drama The Outsiders.
Kilmer’s big screen career began in 1984 as rock singer-turned-spy Nick Rivers in Top Secret!, an oddball comedy from the creators of Airplane! He was a college physics whiz who must stop his work from being weaponized by the CIA in 1985’s Real Genius, followed the next year by his turn as Air Force pilot Tom Cruise’s rival in the surprise action hit Top Gun. Val was the warrior hero Madmartigan in Ron Howard’s unsuccessful 1988 fantasy epic Willow, and while working on the film he met future wife Joanne Whalley (the pair were married from 1988 to 1996). The couple would reteam for the 1989 thriller Kill Me Again.
Oliver Stone tapped Val to play Jim Morrison for his 1991 biodrama The Doors, and the actor–who was initially hesitant because he feared the film would glamourize drug use–immersed himself in the doomed ’60s rock icon’s world, visiting Morrison’s hangouts and dressing and speaking like him for a full year before shooting started. This obsession with detail would come to mark Kilmer’s body of work.
A murder investigation on a Sioux reservation was the setting for 1992’s mystery Thunderheart, with Kilmer (whose family had Cherokee ancestry) playing a part-Sioux FBI agent. Along with the action films The Real McCoy (opposite Kim Basinger) and True Romance (where he played Elvis Presley), 1993 also saw him in one of his most memorable performances, as consumptive gunslinger “Doc” Holliday, in Tombstone. One of many cinematic retellings of the 1881 O.K. Corral gunfight, the film is noted for the chemistry between Kilmer’s Holliday and co-star Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp as well as Doc’s line, “I’m your huckleberry.” Val would later use the line for the title of his 2020 memoir.
In 1995 Kilmer took over Michael Keaton’s cape and cowl to star as Gotham City’s Dark Knight in Batman Forever. Director Joel Schumacher’s less brooding third entry in the Warner Bros. series featured Val’s Batman, joined by Chris O’Donnell’s Robin, tackling Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey). That same year Kilmer held his own against Hollywood legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s taut crime thriller Heat. He was paired with another film giant, Marlon Brando, in 1996’s sci-fi shocker The Island of Dr. Moreau, where his behind-the-camera attitude led director John Frankenheimer to exclaim, “There are two things I will never ever do in my whole life. The first is that I will never climb Mt. Everest. The second is that I will never work with Val Kilmer ever again.”
Kilmer played a big game hunter who joins railroad executive Michael Douglas on the trail of two man-eating lions in 1890s Africa in The Ghost and the Darkness. A 1997 big-screen updating of The Saint, with Val as suave criminal-turned-crimefighter Simon Templar, was a less than divine box office disappointment. Coincidentally, his next role was as the voice of Moses in the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt.
By the end of the ’90s Kilmer had earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, a charge which–rightly or wrongly–led to fewer lead roles from the major studios. In 2000 he played painter Willem de Kooning i9 in the art world biopic Pollock and led an expedition to Mars in Red Planet. 2003 found him taking on the challenge of playing ’70s adult film star John Holmes in the seamy true crime drama Wonderland, then reuniting with Willow director Ron Howard on the frontier thriller The Missing.
2004’s Alexander saw him back with Oliver Stone to play the title conqueror’s father, Phillip II of Macedon, and he was a Delta Force officer who uncovers an international sex trafficking conspiracy that reaches all the way to the White House in writer/director David Mamet’s Spartan. One of Val’s best roles during this time was as a gay L.A. private eye who agrees to let an actor (Robert Downey, Jr.) follow him to research an upcoming role in Shane Black’s witty 2005 actioner Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The next year Kilmer played an FBI special agent who picks ATF officer Denzel Washington to join his elite force in a secret government anti-terrorism program in the time-looping thriller Dèjá Vu. On the small screen, Kilmer provided the voice of talking car K.I.T.T. in the 2008 revival of Knight Rider.
The 2000s and 2010s were marked by a slew of mostly direct-to-video roles, but Kilmer managed to rise above the material more than once. He was title lawman Nicolas Cage’s partner in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in 2009, while in 2010 he was the nuclear warhead-stealing criminal pursued by Will Forte’s inventive hero MacGruber. The onetime Doc Holliday got the chance to play an aging Wyatt Earp in 2012’s Wyatt Earp’s Revenge, and he appeared as Mark Twain in a 2014 family drama, Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn.
Val’s interest in Twain began in 2002, when he started working on a movie script about the cantankerous author’s relationship with Christian Science church founder Mary Baker Eddy (Kilmer was a lifelong Christian Scientist). The work would evolve into a 2012 one-man stage show, Citizen Twain, and seven years later into a film directed by and starring Kilmer, Cinema Twain.
Rumors about the actor’s health began circulating in the mid-2010s, and in 2017 it was confirmed that Kilmer had been undergoing treatment for throat cancer. Repeated operations on his trachea left him nearly unable to speak and a special voice box was implanted, allowing him to continue to work up until 2024’s Top Gun: Maverick. He also appeared as himself and spoke candidly about his life, career, and off-screen controversies in a 2021 documentary simply entitled Val. “I have behaved bizarrely to some,” Kilmer says in the film. “I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed. I am blessed.”