Outside the Beltway

Val Kilmer, 1959-2025

A great actor is gone at 65.

James Joyner · Wednesday, April 2, 2025 · 11 comments

New York Times, “Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65“

Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she said.

Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in a slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof, “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.

He gave a vividly stylized performance as Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.

Mr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), playing an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.

[…]

But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Mr. Kilmer’s career had developed. In 1986, Mr. Scott cast him in his first big-budget film, “Top Gun” (1986), the testosterone-fueled adventure drama about Navy fighter pilots in training, in which Mr. Kilmer played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of Mr. Kilmer’s other prominent appearances as a co-star or a member of a starry ensemble. He reprised it in a brief cameo in the film’s 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”

He played the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western, alongside Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp. He was part of a robbery gang in “Heat” (1995), a contemporary urban “High Noon”-ish tale that was a vehicle for Robert De Niro as the mastermind of a heist and Al Pacino as the cop who chases him down. He was a co-star, billed beneath Michael Douglas, in “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), a period piece about lion hunting set in late 19th century Africa. In “Pollock” (2000), starring Ed Harris as the painter Jackson Pollock, he was a fellow artist, Willem de Kooning. He played Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), in Oliver Stone’s grandiose epic “Alexander” (2004).

Throughout his career Mr. Kilmer often left an impression, with movie viewers as well as moviemakers, of unpredictability.

“Most actors recognize there’s something different in Val than meets the eye,” Mr. Stone said in a 2007 interview for a segment of the television series “Biography.” David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter who directed Mr. Kilmer in the political thriller “Spartan” (2004), added, “What Val has as an actor is something that the really, really great actors have, which is they make everything sound like an improvisation.”

Variety, “Val Kilmer, Star of ‘Batman Forever,’ ‘Tombstone,’ Dies at 65“

Val Kilmer, who played Bruce Wayne in “Batman Forever,” channeled Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone‘s “The Doors” and starred as a tubercular Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles. His daughter Mercedes told The New York Times the cause was pneumonia. He was 65. He had been battling throat cancer for several years.

[…]

The baby-faced blonde actor had a solid run as a leading man with a volatile reputation in the ’80s and ’90s, starring in “Top Gun,” “Real Genius,” “Willow,” “Heat,” and “The Saint.” He returned briefly to screens in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” although he could no longer speak due to his cancer.

In 2021, a documentary on his life, “Val,” was released. His son provided the actor’s voice and the film utilized hundreds of hours of video he had recorded over the years, giving a revealing look at the sets he worked on and showing the actor to be an introspective thinker with an artist’s soul.

[…]

One of his most memorable roles was playing the charismatic and doomed Morrison in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “The Doors.” Kilmer memorized the lyrics to all of Morrison’s songs before his audition, and he immersed himself in the role, wearing clothes similar to the singer’s for close to a year. Roger Ebert wrote of his turn as Jim Morrison, “The performance is the best thing in the movie — and since nearly every scene centers on Morrison, that is not small praise.”

After “Batman Forever,” New Line persuaded him to come on board the troubled production of “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” where Kilmer tangled with both the film’s star, Marlon Brando, and director John Frankenheimer. Frustrations on the production mounted when Brando refused to come to the set, and the documentary “Val” revealed a tense set where crew members grimly joked about Brando’s stand-in, named Norm.

Frankenheimer, the second director to work on completing the film, reportedly said, “There are two things I will never ever do in my whole life. The first is that I will never climb Mt. Everest. The second is that I will never work with Val Kilmer ever again.”

In the 1990s, Kilmer starred in Michael Apted’s Western “Thunderheart” and “The Real McCoy” and had a small but memorable role as an Elvis-like mentor in Tony Scott’s “True Romance.” His role as a sardonic Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993) was one of his most beloved performances, and in 1995, he appeared in “Heat” alongside Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

He went on to star in “The Ghost and the Darkness” and the forgettable remake “The Saint,” which he shot instead of returning as Batman in “Batman & Robin.” Kilmer implied he didn’t return as Batman because of scheduling issues, though Schumacher’s description of him as “psychotic” could have also been a factor.

BBC, “Val Kilmer: A brilliant, underrated and unpredictable film star“

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’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.

That his turn in the bat suit is in most of the headlines announcing his death would surely have amused him. I actually thought he was fine in the role (as was Clooney, for that matter), but the scripts were terrible.

I enjoyed his performance in pretty much every film of his I saw, but his turn as “Doc” Holliday in “Tombstone” was far and away my favorite. Despite being in a supporting role in an all-star cast (Kurt Russell, Powers Booth, Sam Alliot, Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Charlton Heston were among the others), he stole the movie.

Given how much critical praise he got over the years, I’d be hard hard-pressed to say that he was underrated. To the extent he was, it was likely because was played the “pretty boy” role in many of his early parts. I had no idea until this morning that he had trained at Juliard.