Val Kilmer, ‘Top Gun’ and Batman star with an
intense approach, dies at 65
By MARK KENNEDY and
ANDREW DALTON
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Val Kilmer, the brooding,
versatile actor who played fan favorite Iceman in “Top Gun,” donned a
voluminous cape as Batman in “Batman Forever” and portrayed Jim Morrison in
“The Doors,” has died. He was 65.
Kilmer died Tuesday night in Los Angeles, surrounded
by family and friends, his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, said in an email to The
Associated Press.
Val Kilmer died from pneumonia. He had recovered
after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies.
“I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I
have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because
I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed,” he says
toward the end of “Val,” the 2021 documentary on his career. “And I am
blessed.”
Kilmer, the youngest actor ever accepted to the
prestigious
His movie career hit its zenith in the early 1990s
as he made a name for himself as a dashing leading man, starring alongside Kurt
Russell and Bill Paxton in 1993’s “Tombstone,” as Elvis’ ghost in “True
Romance” and as a bank-robbing demolition expert in Michael Mann’s 1995 film
“Heat” with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
“While working with Val on ‘Heat’ I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within
the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character,” director
Michael Mann said in a statement Tuesday night.
Actor Josh Brolin, a
friend of Kilmer, was among others paying tribute.
“You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker,” Brolin
wrote on Instagram. “There’s not a lot left of
those.”
Kilmer — who took part in the Method branch of
Suzuki arts training — threw himself into parts. When he played Doc Holliday in
“
That intensity also gave Kilmer a reputation that he
was difficult to work with, something he grudgingly agreed with later in life,
but always defending himself by emphasizing art over commerce.
“In an unflinching attempt to empower directors,
actors and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each project,
an attempt to breathe Suzukian life into a myriad of
Hollywood moments, I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every
major studio,” he wrote in his memoir, “I’m Your Huckleberry.”
One of his more iconic roles — hotshot pilot Tom
“Iceman” Kazansky opposite Tom Cruise — almost didn’t
happen. Kilmer was courted by director Tony Scott for “Top Gun” but initially
balked. “I didn’t want the part. I didn’t care about the film. The story didn’t
interest me,” he wrote in his memoir. He agreed after being promised that his
role would improve from the initial script. He would reprise the role in the
film’s 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”
One career nadir was playing Batman in Joel
Schumacher’s goofy, garish “Batman Forever” with Nicole Kidman and opposite
Chris O’Donnell‘s Robin — before George Clooney took up the mantle for 1997’s
“Batman & Robin” and after Michael Keaton played
the Dark Knight in 1989’s “Batman” and 1992’s “Batman Returns.”
Janet Maslin in The New York Times said Kilmer was “hamstrung by the
straight-man aspects of the role,” while Roger Ebert deadpanned that he was a
“completely acceptable” substitute for Keaton.
Kilmer, who was one and done as Batman, blamed much of his performance on the
suit.
The Times was the first to report his death on
Tuesday.
“When you’re in it, you can barely move and people
have to help you stand up and sit down,” Kilmer said in “Val,” in lines spoken
by his son Jack, who voiced the part of his father in the film because of his
inability to speak. “You also can’t hear anything and after a while people stop
talking to you, it’s very isolating. It was a struggle for me to get a
performance past the suit, and it was frustrating until I realised
that my role in the film was just to show up and stand where I was told to.”
His next projects were the film version of the 1960s
TV series “The Saint” — fussily putting on wigs, accents and glasses — and “The
Island of Dr. Moreau” with Marlon Brando, which
became one of the decade’s most infamously cursed productions.
David Gregory’s 2014 documentary “Lost Soul: The
Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau,” described a cursed
set that included a hurricane, Kilmer bullying director Richard Stanley, the
firing of Stanley via fax (who sneaked back on set as an extra with a mask on)
and extensive rewrites by Kilmer and Brando. The
older actor told the younger at one point: “‘It’s a
job now, Val. A lark. We’ll get through it.’ I was as
sad as I’ve ever been on a set,” Kilmer wrote in his memoir.
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story about
Kilmer titled ″The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.″ The directors
Schumacher and John Frankenheimer, who finished “The
Island of Dr. Moreau,” said he was difficult. Frankenheimer
said there were two things he would never do: ″Climb
Other artists came to his defense, like D. J.
Caruso, who directed Kilmer in ″The Salton
Sea″ and said the actor simply liked to talk out scenes and enjoyed
having a director’s attention.
″Val needs to immerse himself in a character.
I think what happened with directors like Frankenheimer
and Schumacher is that Val would ask a lot of questions, and a guy like
Schumacher would say, ‘You’re Batman! Just go do it,’″ Caruso told The
New York Times in 2002.
After “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” the movies were
smaller, like David Mamet human-trafficking thriller
“Spartan"; ″Joe the King″ in 1999, in which he played a
paunchy, abusive alcoholic; and playing the doomed ’70s porn star John Holmes
in 2003’s “Wonderland.” He also threw himself into his one-man stage show
“Citizen Twain,” in which he played Mark Twain.
“I enjoy the depth and soul the piece has that Twain
had for his fellow man and
Kilmer spent his formative years in the Chatsworth
neighborhood of
Shortly after he left for Juilliard, his younger
brother, 15-year-old Wesley, suffered an epileptic seizure in the family’s
Jacuzzi and died on the way to the hospital. Wesley was an aspiring filmmaker
when he died.
″I miss him and miss his things. I have his
art up. I like to think about what he would have created. I’m still inspired by
him,″ Kilmer told the Times.
While still at Juilliard, Kilmer co-wrote and
appeared in the play “How It All Began” and later turned down a role in Francis
Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders” for the Broadway play, “Slab Boys,” alongside
Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn.
Kilmer published two books of poetry (including “My
He dated
“I have no regrets,” Kilmer told the AP in 2021.
“I’ve witness and experienced miracles.”
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Kennedy reported from