Val Kilmer, who starred in films such as 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, citing his daughter Mercedes Kilmer.
Photo: AP
The California-born, Juilliard-trained actor was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men in the 1990s before numerous spats with directors and costars 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 criticize 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,” Val 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 then rocketed to fame as Tom Cruise’s costar in the smash 1986 hit Top Gun (1986), playing naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky.
Val Kilmer starred in director Ron Howard’s fantasy Willow (1988) and married his British costar 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 The Doors.
To persuade Stone to cast him, Val Kilmer put together an eight-minute video of himself singing and looking like Morrison at various points in his life. Kilmer’s own singing 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, costarring 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 installment in the Batman series.
The noisy, bloated and plodding Batman Forever was received tepidly by critics, and Val Kilmer was upstaged by costars Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Val Kilmer pulled out of the next Batman movie. Director Joel Schumacher called Val Kilmer “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”
Things only got worse for Val Kilmer when he clashed with costar 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 afterward. “I will never climb Mount Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn’t enough money in the world.”
The Chicago Tribune in 1997 wrote that Val Kilmer was “a member in good standing of Hollywood’s bad boys club.”
He was also nominated multiple times for worst actor in the annual Razzie awards honoring the worst in cinema.
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