The youths don’t know, but Val Kilmer really was a huge deal back in the day. He was an icon because of Top Gun (Iceman!), The Doors (Jim Morrison!) and because he replaced Michael Keaton in the Batman franchise. His heyday was definitely the 1990s, but Tom Cruise insisted on bringing his dear friend Val back for Top Gun: Maverick, in what were some emotional scenes for both men. Well, Val Kilmer has passed away at the age of 65.
Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65. The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she said.
Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in a slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof, “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.
He gave a vividly stylized performance as Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.
Mr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), playing an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.
He played the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western, alongside Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp. He was part of a robbery gang in “Heat” (1995), a contemporary urban “High Noon”-ish tale that was a vehicle for Robert De Niro as the mastermind of a heist and Al Pacino as the cop who chases him down. He was a co-star, billed beneath Michael Douglas, in “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), a period piece about lion hunting set in late 19th century Africa. In “Pollock” (2000), starring Ed Harris as the painter Jackson Pollock, he was a fellow artist, Willem de Kooning. He played Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), in Oliver Stone’s grandiose epic “Alexander” (2004).
A lot of people are citing Heat as Kilmer’s finest performance, which saw him act against Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the Michael Mann classic. Kilmer is legitimately great in Heat, but my God, he really captured Jim Morrison in The Doors. Like, the authenticity of that performance is still spooky. I’d also like to shout-out The Saint, because while it was a fruity ‘90s action movie, it was actually really enjoyable and he’s great in it. Kilmer had so many health struggles in the last decade of his life, but his friends really looked out for him, and it just showed that he’d earned a lot of goodwill within Hollywood.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
