‘Top Gun’ and ‘The Doors’ Star Val Kilmer Dead at 65

Actor Val Kilmer has died at the age of 65.

According to The New York Times, the star of movies such as Top Gun, The Doors and Tombstone died of pneumonia Tuesday in Los Angeles. Kilmer notably survived a battle with throat cancer in 2014.

One of the most talented actors of his generation, Kilmer could play everything from broad comedy to hard-edged drama. At the height of his fame, he took on a string of memorable roles in blockbuster movies, starring across from Tom Cruise in Top Gun, playing a master criminal alongside Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat, donning the Batman costume in Batman Forever, channeling Jim Morrison in The Doors, and portraying the gunslinger Doc Holiday in Tombstone. His acting career spanned some forty years, although its later stages were cut short by a throat cancer that impaired speaking ability.

Born December 31, 1959, Kilmer was raised as a Christian Scientist in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, and had a childhood marked by both dreams of the stage and personal tragedy.­­­ His parents divorced when he was young, and his father moved Kilmer and his two brothers onto a 300-acre ranch that had once been owned by Roy Rogers. It was there that Kilmer developed a love of acting, in part through starring in childhood films directed by his younger brother Wesley. At 17, Kilmer became the youngest person at the time to be accepted into the Julliard Drama School, but time there was shadowed by Wesley’s accidental death at the age of 15.

After Julliard, Kilmer’s first big break on the stage came in a 1983 off-Broadway production of The Slab Boys, alongside Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. His move to Hollywood occurred in the following year, when he was cast as the lead in the off-the-wall spy-movie spoof Top Secret, in which he played a rock star and performed his own songs (he would also release an album under the character’s name, Nick Rivers).

But it was his role as Lt. Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky in Top Gun in 1986 that launched Kilmer into the national consciousness. Shifting seamlessly away from the comedic roles that had defined his screen career to that point, he played an arrogant fighter pilot, demonstrating the first time the degree to which he could portray unlikable or disreputable characters without sacrificing any of his remarkable on-screen charisma.

Read More: Top 10 Val Kilmer Movies

Kilmer’s breakout in the original Top Gun led to a series of larger and larger roles. He landed the lead in 1988’s fantasy blockbuster Willow, on the set of which he met the actress Joanne Whalley, to whom he would be married from 1988 to 1996. The following years brought more success, and he would play Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 movie The Doors, and star as Batman in 1995.

Watch Val Kilmer in ‘The Doors’

But perhaps his most memorable role from this period is that of Doc Holliday in 1993’s Tombstone, in which he created a character whose deadliness with a gun and dissipated lifestyle was perfectly matched by a surprisingly transparent humanity. With its combination of dry humor, louche edge, and undeniable charisma, Kilmer’s performance cemented the role of Doc Holliday – which had also been played by actors the like of Dennis Quaid, Victor Mature, and Kirk Douglas – as forever his own.

Kilmer would work steadily throughout the next two decades, appearing in everything from indy dramas to big-budget action-comedies, until his cancer diagnosis in 2015. Although he continued to appear on screen occasionally – including his final role in the 2022 reboot Top Gun: Maverick, which featured a touching fourth wall-bending farewell scene – his vocal difficulties posed great challenges.

Throughout his career, Kilmer amassed a reputation as a difficult collaborator. He had well documented run-ins with directors Joel Schumacher on the set of Batman Forever, and John Frankenheimer during the filming of The Island of Dr. Moreau, and could be seen as aloof by his fellow actors.

Although this description certainly wasn’t universally shared – Robert Downey Jr. raved about working with him on Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, from 2005, and Kilmer had many other ardent supporters in the industry – he did admit later in his career that he never had either the patience or the interest to play the Hollywood game very well. In a 2012 interview with Backstage during the time he was performing a one-man play about Mark Twain, Kilmer noted that he “wasn’t very practical in thinking about Hollywood and our business. It’s a very social business and I never tried to be involved in the community of it. [I was] pretty foolish about that.”

Watch Val Kilmer in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’

But if this was the case, this behavior emerged from a laudable place. As became clear in the 2022 documentary Val, throughout his career, Kilmer was more interested in devoting himself to his craft than he was in being a movie star. Because of this, regardless of how much how many films he made, he never quite fit in to Hollywood. He remained wary of an industry, he explained in the documentary, that seemed to want to “buy your life…your experience, your opinions, your soul.” And because of his aversion to this, he “just ended up in, sort of, constant conflicts with people that wanted me to do commercial work.”

Regardless of these conflicts, what Kilmer will be best remembered for is not what happened off the screen, but what happened on it. Through the his remarkable talent and ability to effortlessly charm the viewer, he built a career in which his focus always remained on the attempt to master the art of acting itself. And more often than not, he succeeded.

Watch Val Kilmer in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’