VAL KILMER
(31 December 1959 - 1 April 2025)
The American actor Val Kilmer has died at the age of 65 from pneumonia following a long struggle with throat cancer. In 2014 he experienced a lump in his throat but ignored it until he began to spit up blood. Having tested for tumours he denied having cancer and, being a Christian Scientist, refused treatment. Eventually he did undergo some surgery which affected his voice, preventing him from speaking normally. After chemo and two tracheotomies he became cancer-free, but needed an electric voice box and a feeding tube. Later on he experimented with digital software but finally used his own voice digitally enhanced for clarity. Not the best way to end any career, but Kilmer was a fighter and desperate to do well.
Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles, California, the second of three sons, to Eugene and Gladys Kilmer. His mother was of Swedish descent and his father had Cherokee, Irish and German roots. His parents divorced when Val was eight and his mother remarried. After attending Chatsworth High, he joined the Juilliard School Drama Division. In 1984, he landed his first movie, the lead in Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s spy spoof Top Secret!, as an Elvis-like rock star in which he sang his own songs.
His career was elevated further with his appearance as Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986). With Cruise’s good looks and Kilmer’s handsome but unorthodox appearance, the film, like its aircraft, took off, earning in excess of $350 million. Whether this was due to the hint of homoeroticism that the film exuded, nobody could determine. Anyway, the 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, did even better by coining $1.496 billion.
In 1988 Kilmer starred in Ron Howard’s fantasy adventure Willow on which he met his future wife, the actress Joanne Whalley. Oliver Stone’s The Doors was a personal hit for Kilmer, in which he played Jim Morrison, although it was not generally well received. Many directors had shown interest in the life of the influential band – including Tarantino, Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese and Friedkin - but Oliver Stone took it on and was right for the job. Kilmer then went on to star in Tombstone, in which he was Doc Holliday in the famous OK Corral gunfight, with Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp. Kilmer played Elvis Presley in Tony Scott’s True Romance with a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino and then came Batman Forever with Kilmer as Bruce Wayne. Some say he was the best Batman of the current revivals of the DC Comics character, a fact reflected in its commercial rather than critical success, making over $336 million, the biggest money-maker of 1995 at the US box-office.
Kilmer did not play Batman again because he was contracted to play Simon Templar in The Saint from the spy stories by Leslie Charteris. Michael Mann’s Heat fared better, a crime drama with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jon Voight. The Island of Dr Moreau, co-starring Marlon Brando, was a flop, as was the sci-fi action film Red Planet. Kilmer played the abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning in Pollock with Ed Harris in the title role as the action painter Jackson Pollock. Oliver Stone’s Alexander saw Kilmer as Philip II of Macedonia, opposite Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great. Ron Howard’s The Missing was a Western with Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett with Kilmer in the minor role of a brutal army officer. Other films from the early 2000s included David Mamet’s political thriller Spartan and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), the latter generally accepted as showing Kilmer at his best. More popular outside the US, the film sadly only gained a limited release. Many of Kilmer’s films suffered the same fate, although he had a fine body of work to his credit. He continued working on many movies until his last, Top Gun: Maverick in 2022.
In 2021, however, he made his own documentary about his life and career, using his own footage, home movies and his fight with throat cancer. It showed scenes from his marriage to Joanne Whalley in 1988 and their children Mercedes and Jack. They divorced in 1996. Until 2011 he owned a ranch in New Mexico where he would go trekking, hiking and fishing as well as breeding bison. He was involved in charity work as well and was a supporter of Native American concerns. At 65 he was too young to die as he may well have produced more good work as the gifted actor he was. Despite a reputation for being difficult, he knew what he had to do to get the best results. Although nominated for several awards, he never won a major US accolade. Perhaps a posthumous gong could be forthcoming from the Academy at the next Oscars.
MICHAEL DARVELL