Val Kilmer, the man who was Batman or Van Morrison, the hero of Willow, the protagonist of the delirious Top Secret, the legendary ICE who challenged Tom Cruise in Top Gun, The Saint who also robbed banks with Robert De Niro in Heat, has passed away on Tuesday at the age of 65, as explained by his daughter Mercedes in a statement.
Kilmer, tall, handsome, "chronically eccentric" in the words of his friend Robert Downey Jr., was one of those peculiar figures in Hollywood. A star, but not a super star. Someone capable of seducing directors and producers, someone who had what "only truly excellent actors have, making everything sound like improvisation," according to David Mamet. "He works harder than most actors to make it seem believable," praised Tombstone director George Cosmatos in the Los Angeles Times in 1993. "He is among the great American actors like Al Pacino or De Niro."
But he also forged a reputation as someone elusive, unlikeable to many, distant. With obsessions, work methods, and characters not always easy to fit in. Egocentric and arrogant, especially in his early days when success came quickly.
The actor, born and raised in Los Angeles, attended high school with figures like Kevin Spacey and Mare Winningham, all of the same age. He started making amateur films with his brothers right away. As if it were the dramatic part that accompanies someone of a myth, his younger brother Wesley suffered an epileptic seizure and drowned in the family pool, which his parents had bought from the western film legends Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Shortly after, he was one of the youngest talents ever accepted by the prestigious Juilliard School, and debuted in theater before succeeding in films alongside other iconic figures of his generation, like Kevin Bacon or Sean Penn.
Fame and money came with successes like Top Gun or his role as Jim Morrison in The Doors, and also with failures like Batman Forever, which grossed over 300 million dollars in its opening, surpassed that year only by Toy Story.
Critics always criticized him for a certain indefiniteness, transitioning from charismatic characters in action films, powerful, to others "tormented and self-deprecating", like the two mentioned, the gunslinger Doc Holliday in Tombstone or the gay detective Gay Perry in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), Shane Black's tribute to film noir. Not to mention Elvis Presley or John Holmes, the drug-addicted porn star in Wonderland.
In 2015, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. And in Val, a documentary about his life premiered at Cannes in 2021, it was seen how he needed a breathing tube. In 2022, he briefly appeared in the sequel to Top Gun, where his health problems were evident. This gave the scenes with Tom Cruise a perfect closure for characters who had been rivals and then almost brothers.