Temperamental on-set behaviour by successful actors is common, but rarely made public. So it takes a particular type of performer, or one with poor PR defences, to become notorious for tantrums or capriciousness. The actor Val Kilmer, who has died aged 65 after suffering from pneumonia, was one such case.
He starred in several box-office hits, including Top Gun (1986), and played roles as distinctive as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and the ghost of Elvis Presley in True Romance (1993). He also got a fleeting taste of superstardom when he took the lead in Batman Forever (1995).
Yet still he was better known in Hollywood for being difficult to work with than for any of his performances. Michael Douglas berated him for unprofessionalism on the set of The Ghost and the Darkness (1997), while John Frankenheimer, who worked with him on the ill-fated 1996 remake of The Island of Dr Moreau, said: “Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it.”
On the other hand, Michael Mann, who directed him in Heat (1995), and Oliver Stone, who wrote and directed The Doors, spoke admiringly of him as a collaborator. At its best, Kilmer’s acting combined playfulness and intensity. He also had a flair for comedy that was under-used except in a few instances. One of these was his film debut, Top Secret! (1984), a scattershot spoof of second world war movies in which he demonstrated straight-faced comic aplomb amid a myriad wacky sight gags from the team behind Airplane! Even here, though, his approach was one of the utmost seriousness.
The film-makers Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams advised him to loosen up and enjoy himself. “The boys always wanted me to have more fun,” recalled Kilmer, “but I wanted to be good and I took it all way too seriously.” It was ever thus. As an adolescent, he had reportedly walked off the set of a hamburger commercial when he found himself unable to manufacture sufficient enthusiasm for the product in hand.
Kilmer, whose ancestry was Cherokee-German-Irish-Swedish, was born in Los Angeles, to Gladys (nee Ekstadt) and Eugene. His father was said to have amassed a $100m fortune from supplying parts to the aircraft and aerospace industries (though his real-estate business filed for bankruptcy in 1991). Kilmer’s parents, who raised him as a Christian Scientist, divorced when he was nine. The second of three sons, he was distraught at the death of his younger brother, Wesley, who drowned at the age of 15 after suffering an epileptic seizure while swimming.
He was educated at Chatsworth high school and the Hollywood Professional school before studying drama at the Juilliard School, New York, where at 17 he was its youngest ever student. It was there that he co-wrote and played the lead in How It All Began, a play about the German terrorist Michael Baumann.
The producer Joseph Papp staged it at the Public theatre in New York. Kilmer won acclaim at the Playhouse theatre in 1983 for playing Alan, the rich kid in John Byrne’s The Slab Boys, opposite Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon as his working-class tormentors. Frank Rich of the New York Times commended him on the “fine, firm shading” of his performance.
That led directly to him being cast in Top Secret! He starred next in the comedy Real Genius (1985) and played Tom Cruise’s rival, Iceman, in Top Gun. Kilmer later called Top Gun “silly” and “a horrible celebration of redneckness”. He reprised his role briefly in the 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, which became his final screen appearance. Though he turned down prestigious directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman) and high-profile films (Blue Velvet, Dirty Dancing), Kilmer stayed in work, though his choices sometimes betrayed an uncertainty about the sort of actor he wanted to be. He starred in the whimsical fantasy adventure Willow (1988), produced by the Star Wars creator George Lucas, and won plaudits for the TV movie Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid (1989). He appeared in the noir thriller Kill Me Again (also 1989) opposite Joanne Whalley, whom he had met on the set of Willow. (“Top British actress elopes to Arizona with Cher’s former lover,” reported the Daily Mail, making reference to one of Kilmer’s old flames.) Whalley added Kilmer’s surname to hers after the couple were married in 1988. They divorced eight years later.
In 1991, The Doors gave him the nearest thing he had to a signature part, though he was excellent also as a foppish Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993). Subsequent years comprised a mixture of missed opportunities and misguided choices, with the occasional high-point such as Heat.
Kilmer was but one contributing factor to the disaster that was The Island of Dr Moreau, which went through two directors, the first of whom, Richard Stanley, was said to have later sneaked back on set in disguise. On that movie, Marlon Brando, himself no goody-two-shoes when it came to on-set etiquette, was heard to accuse Kilmer of having confused his talents with the size of his pay cheque.
The lead role in a feeble film version of the British television series The Saint (1997) did not improve Kilmer’s prospects. After providing the voices of Moses and God in the DreamWorks animation The Prince of Egypt (1998) and starring in the science-fiction thriller Red Planet (2002), he seemed to relinquish his conflicted mainstream ambitions and to prioritise quality instead.
He won praise playing the porn star John Holmes in Wonderland (2003) and had a small but significant part in the western The Missing (2003) after he wrote to its director, Ron Howard, apologising for his bad behaviour on the set of their previous film together, Willow. Kilmer was wryly charismatic as the taciturn agent hired to rescue the president’s daughter in David Mamet’s minimalist thriller Spartan. He was reunited with Stone for the historical epic Alexander (also 2004).
Kilmer did the warmest work of his career in the comic thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), in which he played “Gay” Perry, a private investigator who teams up with a thief-turned-actor (Robert Downey Jr). The character’s sexuality had been Kilmer’s idea. “I said, ‘We gotta get a little colour in here. We gotta juice it up a little. I think I should be gay. I think I should kiss Robert Downey in the middle of the film. Maybe even earlier. Several times.’” He also observed that, “Maybe this wasn’t my first gay role. Maybe that was Top Gun.”
The parts that followed were divided between straight-to-DVD movies and television miniseries, though there were some interesting exceptions: Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009); the action spoof MacGruber (2010), which marked a welcome return to comedy for Kilmer; Coppola’s horror film Twixt (2011); and Palo Alto (2013), based on stories by James Franco and also starring Kilmer’s son, Jack. A 2021 documentary, Val, found him reflecting on his life and career, as he had done in the previous year’s memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry.
Theatrical endeavours included a return in 2004 to the role of Moses in The Ten Commandments: The Spectacle Musical, the lead in a West End production of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 2005, and the 2012 one-man show Citizen Twain, which Kilmer wrote and directed, and in which he also played Mark Twain.
Late in the day, Kilmer acknowledged that he had been a difficult collaborator. “I understand how hard it is for directors to direct,” he said in 2005. “I try to participate more in [the director’s] experience than I have in the past. I hope I’ve done my penance.” He appeared also to have grasped the value of self-deprecation.
He played two exaggerated versions of himself – first as a washed-up actor-turned-life coach in The Lotus Community Workshop, Harmony Korine’s contribution to the portmanteau film The Fourth Dimension (2012), and then in 2013 on the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant sitcom Life’s Too Short, in which he was shown begging for funding for a sequel to Willow and harassing restaurant diners by challenging them to guess his identity while wearing a Batman mask (“Think! Don’t you people go to the movies?”).
This humorous side spilled over into his exchanges with the press. Asked in 2003 if there was a biblical figure with whom he identified, he replied: “Other than God?”
He is survived by Mercedes and Jack, his two children with Whalley.
• Val Kilmer, actor, born 31 December 1959; died 1 April 2025
