Actor Val Kilmer, star of ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Batman Forever’, dies at 65, NYT reports

Val Kilmer, who starred in the films Top Gun, The Doors and Batman Forever while earning 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, quoting his daughter Mercedes Kilmer.

The California-born, Juilliard-trained actor was one of Hollywood's most prominent leading men in the 1990s before 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.”

He made his film debut in the spy spoof Top Secret! (1984) before appearing in the goofy comedy Real Genius (1985). He rocketed to fame as Tom Cruise's co-star in the smash 1986 hit Top Gun, playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky.

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 divorcing.

One of his most challenging roles came in director 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 persuade Stone to cast him, Kilmer put together an eight-minute video of himself singing and looking like Morrison at different points in his life. Kilmer's own 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 tepidly received 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”.

Things grew worse for Kilmer when he clashed with co-star Marlon Brando during the notoriously troubled production of The Island of Dr Moreau, which flopped in 1996.

“There are two things I would never do again in my life,” John Frankenheimer, who directed the movie, said later.

“I will never climb Mt Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world.”

The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1997 that Kilmer was “a member in good standing of Hollywood's bad boys club”. He was nominated many times for worst actor in the annual Razzie awards honouring the worst in cinema.

Kilmer's personal life sometimes overshadowed his work. His relationships with high-profile women included singer Cher and model Cindy Crawford.

Kilmer also starred in:

• The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) with Michael Douglas;
• The Saint (1997) with Elisabeth Shue;
• At First Sight (1999) with Mira Sorvino;
• Red Planet (2000);
• The Salton Sea (2002);
• director Stone's Alexander (2004) and
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) with Robert Downey Jnr.

Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and a tracheotomy that permanently gave him a raspy speaking voice. Post-cancer, his films included a Top Gun sequel, The Snowman (2017) and Paydirt (2020), which featured his daughter Mercedes.

Born in Los Angeles on December 31 1959, Kilmer began acting in high school and became the youngest student accepted into the drama division of the famed Juilliard School in New York.

Phillip Noyce, who directed him in The Saint, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997 that Kilmer “is plagued by a bad image, but most of it is unjustified. The real Val Kilmer is a lamb. And he is the hardest-working actor I've ever seen.”

Reuters