One of the youngest students ever accepted to study performing arts at the Juilliard School in New York, Val Kilmer spent years honing his craft, expecting to become a classically trained Shakespearean actor.
Instead, he rose to prominence in a different kind of period piece: Top Gun, the Hollywood blockbuster that embodied 1980s bombast and machismo, his chiselled torso glistening in the Californian sunshine as he played beach volleyball with Tom Cruise. “It was all silly to me. I’d been preparing to do Hamlet for ten years,” Kilmer told an interviewer in 2020. “Fame wasn’t my priority. And I had it.”
What he did with it produced mixed results. With his half-hexagon jaw, long blond hair, high-wattage teeth and pout-primed lips, in appearance he was Scandinavia meets Santa Barbara, a Viking ready to swap seafaring for surfing. A reporter once described his face as “a billboard for California lust”. There was talent, too, and by the Nineties he commanded $6 million a movie and scored starring roles in blockbusters.
Yet something was rotten. Despite his leading-man looks, his best work came as a supporting actor and he acquired a reputation as a difficult, even toxic, colleague, reduced to low-budget productions as his star waned in the 2000s before throat cancer claimed his voice. With a finely tuned sense of his own self-importance, a serious dedication to his craft and a sense of humour that would not have seemed out of place in a fraternity house, he was perfectly cast as a “best of the best” pilot.
Their jets fuelled as much by testosterone as kerosene, the rivalry between the two United States naval aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell played by Cruise, and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky portrayed by Kilmer, is at the core of the 1986 film. While Cruise went on to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most bankable actors, headlining a string of hits, Kilmer would be shunned by leading studios.
“He must have a large capacity to deal with the business side of movies,” Kilmer said of Cruise in 1995.
Patently, Kilmer did not, even from a tender age. His first paid acting role was in a cheeseburger commercial. The 13-year-old was asked to relish the meal. “The thing tasted like cardboard. The director kept telling me to put my heart into it. I couldn’t. I didn’t,” Kilmer wrote in his 2020 memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry. “I walked off the set and never appeared in the commercial and never got paid, my first act of artistic integrity.”
Kilmer felt that Iceman was one-dimensional. “I didn’t want to do Top Gun at first. I felt the script was silly and disliked warmongering in film, but I was under contract with the studio so I didn’t really have a choice,” he recalled. He constructed a backstory to add depth: Iceman was driven by an arrogant need for perfection because while growing up his father had ignored him. Kilmer got along well with Cruise. But to raise the temperature of their on-screen enmity he sought to stoke conflict between them off the set, aiming to divide the cast into pro-Iceman or pro-Maverick camps.
For the prize role of Jim Morrison in The Doors, the 1991 Oliver Stone-directed biopic of the musician, Kilmer immersed himself in the task, obsessively studying videos of the late singer to copy his movements and mannerisms. By his own account, Kilmer spent a year trying to live as the erratic Morrison, wearing similar clothes and endlessly listening to Doors music.
His dedication paid off as his compelling performance enjoyed critical acclaim, though the film as a whole garnered mixed reviews. However, Hollywood insiders began to wonder if there was madness in his method acting. During an audition for an argument scene in The Doors, Kilmer allegedly hit an actress, Caitlin O’Heaney, in the face, picked her up and threw her to the ground. She told BuzzFeed in 2017 that the incident prompted a police report and a confidential settlement.
Kilmer was unfortunate not to pick up a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his turn as the alcoholic Doc Holliday in the western Tombstone (1993), a triumphant retelling of the Wyatt Earp story. For Holliday’s deathbed scene, Kilmer had the bed filled with ice so he would shake and feel discomfort like his character.
His star peaked in 1995 with another fine supporting performance alongside Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the Michael Mann heist thriller Heat, and he was chosen to succeed Michael Keaton as Batman. The experience proved a lowlight. Kilmer was overshadowed by his villainous Batman Forever co-stars, Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones, as the constricting bat suit contributed to a stiff performance. “Do about an hour of acting then you fall down, hyperventilate and need oxygen and water,” he complained. Nor did the makers of the lucrative franchise appear to share his lofty artistic vision. “My work wasn’t about acting; it was a modelling experience,” he groused.
The film broke box-office records but given the discord it was no surprise that George Clooney acquired the keys to the Batmobile for the next instalment. “He isn’t just a high-strung, difficult actor,” the director Joel Schumacher said of Kilmer to Time magazine in 1997. “He’s a deeply troubled man in need of psychiatric help.” Kilmer was reported to have shoved Schumacher against the wall of a trailer during a break in filming. The director also described the actor as “a damaged megalomaniac”, adding that Kilmer “can be one of the most charming, seductive people” but was prone to “tear-the-wings-off-a-fly behaviour”. One headline dubbed him “Brat-man”.
The actor insisted that, rather than being sacked, he passed on Batman and Robin in favour of The Saint, a 1997 big-screen remake of the 1960s and 1970s British spy television series. Before a pre-production meeting with Phillip Noyce, the director, Kilmer followed him down a dark street, sneaked up behind him and whispered in his ear, “Are you looking for someone?” The character of Simon Templar, a master of disguise, allowed Kilmer to show off his charisma and versatility, though the film was critically unloved and only a modest commercial success.
It was a triumph, though, in comparison with The Island of Dr Moreau (1996), a misfiring adaptation of an HG Wells science-fiction novel. The shoot was beset by problems and Kilmer’s cherished chance to make a film with his idol, Marlon Brando, devolved into a nightmare. Brando, himself no stranger to temperamental behaviour, was said to have told Kilmer: “Your problem is, you confuse your talent with the size of your pay cheque.”
Kilmer was accused of burning the side of a cameraman’s face with a cigarette; he said the contact was accidental. And the actor and the veteran director John Frankenheimer, a last-minute replacement, did not gel with him. “There are two things I will never do in my life,” Frankenheimer later declared. “I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn’t enough money in the world.”
Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles in 1959, the second of three sons to Eugene, a property developer, and Gladys (née Ekstadt). His parents, both Christian Scientists, divorced in 1968 because, he said, his mother left his father after he had several affairs. In 1971 his father bought a ranch formerly owned by the “singing cowboy” Roy Rogers. His father was hit by money troubles and his younger brother, Wesley, an aspiring film-maker, drowned aged 15 after suffering an epileptic seizure in a hot tub. “My confidant had disappeared into dust and my family was never the same again,” Kilmer said.
In high school he acted with a fellow pupil, Kevin Spacey, and dated a future Academy Award nominee, the actress and singer-songwriter Mare Winningham. He took up smoking so he could portray Tom Wingfield more realistically for a school production of The Glass Menagerie. Kilmer moved to New York to enter Juilliard at 17; contemporaries included Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and his future Top Gun co-star Kelly McGillis.
An early break came when he was cast in the 1984 spy spoof Top Secret! While filming in London he stayed near the Royal Court Theatre, where a British actress, Joanne Whalley, was performing. Kilmer fell in love with her, returning to watch the play night after night and even following the cast to a pub after a show, though he was too shy to approach her. They finally met when they were cast in Willow, a 1988 fantasy film directed by Ron Howard, and married that year. They moved to a ranch in New Mexico, which he was forced to sell amid financial problems after the 2008 financial crisis, and had two children, Jack and Mercedes, both actors. The union ended in 1996; Kilmer was served with divorce papers while filming The Island of Dr Moreau, which did nothing to ease his stress levels. In 2011, Whalley initiated court proceedings over an alleged failure to make child support payments.
Kilmer later dated Daryl Hannah and described their split as his most painful: “When we broke up, I cried every day for half a year.” He was also romantically linked with Cindy Crawford, Angelina Jolie and Ellen Barkin, and had an ardent two-year relationship with Cher, who was 14 years his senior, in the early Eighties.
His turn with Robert Downey Jr in the 2005 black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was well received, and there was no shortage of roles on offer in independent films to help to ease his money concerns. He also voiced the car, Kitt, in a 2008 television reboot of Knight Rider, and pursued his passion project, Citizen Twain. He wrote, directed and starred in the comic touring one-man play (later turned into a film) as one of his heroes, Mark Twain, also using it as a vehicle to explore his fascination with Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church.
However, his ballooning weight was fodder for the tabloids (who dubbed him “Fatman”) and in 2014 he was diagnosed with throat cancer while living in Malibu. “I was a weirdo beach bum and it was bliss — then bliss turned to mayhem. I coughed up coagulated blood,” he wrote in his book. He required an emergency tracheostomy, though his faith in Christian Science, which teaches adherents to rely primarily on prayer for healing, complicated matters. “I prayed, and that was my form of treatment,” he told The New York Times in 2020, describing the cancer as less a fact than a “suggestion”.
He ultimately underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy at the urging of his children. A feeding tube was installed in his throat and his voice reduced to a muffled croak. As a result his son, Jack, narrated Val, a moving 2021 documentary about his life that drew on thousands of hours of home videos shot by Kilmer over four decades.
Left gaunt and frail, he was almost unrecognisable from the Iceman of old, but reprised the role in a cameo in a long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick (2022). His scene with the implausibly youthful Cruise was imbued with pathos by their physical contrast, with Kilmer’s character communicating by typing and speaking with a computer-enhanced voice.
An enthusiastic curator of his own mythology, in later life he regaled interviewers and his social media followers with quirky and indiscreet celebrity tales. He wrote poems, painted artworks referencing some of his best-known roles and was often found at an office space in Hollywood that doubled as an art gallery, studio, screening room and merchandise store, and as the base of a foundation promoting Twain and Shakespeare to school pupils.
“I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely, bizarrely to some,” he reflected in Val. “I see myself as a sensitive, intelligent human being, but with the soul of a clown.”
Val Kilmer, actor, was born on December 31, 1959. He died on April 1, 2025, of pneumonia, aged 65
