Val Kilmer, who has died at the age of 65, was often underrated as an actor. He had extraordinary range: excelling in comedies, westerns, crime dramas, musical biopics and action-adventures films alike. And perhaps his best performance combined his skills as a stage actor with a fine singing voice, to bring to life 1960s-counterculture icon Jim Morrison, in Oliver Stone’s film The Doors. Critic Roger Ebert wrote: “If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Val Kilmer should get it. In movies as different as Real Genius, Top Gun, Top Secret!, he has shown a range of characters so convincing that it’s likely most people, even now, don’t realise they were looking at the same actor.”
Kilmer was born into a Christian Science family in California, and his parents were Christian Scientists, a movement to which Kilmer would adhere for the rest of his life. He attended Chatsworth High School, in the San Fernando Valley, where future actor Kevin Spacey was among his classmates and where he developed a love of drama.
Kilmer’s ambition was to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), in London, but his application was rejected because, at 17, he was a year below the minimum entry age. Instead, Kilmer became the then youngest pupil to enrol at the Julliard School, in New York, one of the world’s most prestigious drama conservatories.
A year later, Kilmer starred in London’s West End, in Andrew Rattenbury’s adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice – as Frank Chambers, the drifter played by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film. And in 2006, he reunited with director Scott, for sci-fi film Deja Vu, which received a mixed response. Kilmer also voiced Kitt – the futuristic car – in a pilot for television series Nightrider.
He spent years working on a one-man show, Citizen Twain, which examined the relationship between Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her long-term critic writer Mark Twain. A 90-minute film was eventually released, directed by Kilmer.
In 2014, Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation left him with a tube in his trachea and difficulty breathing. As a Christian Scientist, Kilmer had mixed views about seeking medical interventions and at times ascribed physical improvements to the power of prayer rather than medicine. On occasion, he denied he had cancer at all.
In 2021, Kilmer made Val, a documentary about his life. It delved into his darkest places and experiences, including his brother Wesley’s accidental drowning as a teenager and the breakdown of his marriage.
A year later, there was time for a final starring role. Planned for a decade, Top Gun: Maverick reunited Kilmer and Cruise, updating their former rivalry in the post-Cold War era. Kilmer’s cancer could not be hidden. Instead, it was written into his character’s story. “It’s time to let go,” Iceman tells Maverick in one poignant scene. Kilmer will be remembered as a complicated man and a fine but difficult actor. He never embraced the kind of Hollywood party lifestyle his looks and fame might have brought him. Instead, he tended to slip away to spend time with his children, on a ranch he owned in New Mexico. “I don’t really have too much of a notion about success or popularity,” Kilmer once said. “I never cultivated fame, I never cultivated a persona, except possibly the desire to be regarded as an actor.”
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