Val Kilmer, film star who played Batman and Jim Morrison, passes away 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. Val Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she said.

Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, 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.

Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in Thunderheart (1992), playing an unseasoned FBI 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 Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.

“Serious audiences will be less interested than ever in what’s under Batman’s cape or cowl,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “There’s not much to contemplate here beyond the spectacle of gimmicky props and the kitsch of good actors (all of whom have lately done better work elsewhere) dressed for a red-hot Halloween.”

But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Kilmer’s career had developed. In 1986, 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 Kilmer played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of 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 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 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,” Stone said in a 2007 interview for a segment of the television series Biography. David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter who directed 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.”

On the screen, he was both charismatic and curiosity-piquing, an actor who didn’t let his characters give emotional clues away easily. Off the screen, he had his share of disagreements, especially early in his career, when he earned a reputation for surliness and self-involvement. A 1996 cover article about him in Entertainment Weekly was titled “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.”

“He offended people by being hard to understand,” said Stone, one of several people over the years who said Kilmer turned them off before turning them back on again. Robert Downey Jr., who co-starred with Kilmer in the wry 2005 murder mystery Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, acknowledged in the Biography segment that he couldn’t stand him when they first met, though they eventually became great friends.

“I’m sure this can’t be news to you that he’s chronically eccentric,” Downey said.

Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 1959, and grew up in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the far northwest part of the city, where his neighbors were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and his high school classmates were Kevin Spacey and Mare Winningham. His father, Eugene, a real estate developer, and his mother, the former Gladys Ekstadt, divorced when Val was 9. His younger brother Wesley drowned in a swimming pool in 1977, an event that haunted Kilmer for years afterward.

His memories of that loss were at the center of his performance in The Salton Sea (2002), about a man driven by guilt and seeking redemption after witnessing the murder of his wife and being unable to save her. “There are several points in the movie where the guy just can’t go on,” Kilmer said in an interview with The New York Times in 2002. “I didn’t really get back to earth until about two or three years after my brother died.”

He applied to the Juilliard School in New York and at 17 became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting program there. At Juilliard, he and several classmates wrote and performed How It All Began, adapted from the autobiography of West German urban guerrilla Michael Baumann. In 1981, after Kilmer graduated, he appeared in a professional production of the play at the Public Theater.

He made his Broadway debut in 1983 in The Slab Boys, a drama by John Byrne about young workers in a Scottish carpet factory that also featured Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. He later played Hamlet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder in 1988 and the male lead, Giovanni, opposite Jeanne Tripplehorn in a Public Theater production of the lurid Jacobean tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, in 1992.

Kilmer’s marriage to actress Joanne Whalley, whom he met on the set of Ron Howard’s children’s fantasy film Willow (1988), ended in divorce. His survivors include their children, Mercedes and Jack. Kilmer lived on a ranch near Santa Fe for many years and once pondered a run for governor of New Mexico.

Kilmer’s other significant film credits include The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), a horror movie based on an early novel by H.G. Wells; Wonderland (2003), a murder story based on a true crime in which he played pornography star John Holmes; and Twixt (2011), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, about a horror writer whose book tour takes him to a creepy town haunted by a years-ago murder of children.

Like his fellow actor Hal Holbrook, Kilmer had a long-standing fascination with Mark Twain, and he spent many years researching and writing a one-man play, Citizen Twain, which he began performing around the country in 2010. (Kilmer, who had trouble managing his weight, gave his interest in Twain credit for helping him slim down at last.)

He also appeared as Twain in a 2014 film adaptation of Twain’s work, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and he planned to direct and star in a film he wrote about Twain and Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who founded Christian Science, whom Twain repeatedly criticized. Kilmer was a Christian Scientist.

In 2021, Kilmer was the subject of Val, a documentary about him based on decades of archival footage. His children were associate producers, and his son Jack was the narrator. The film won several awards, including a Critics Choice Award for best historical or biographical documentary.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, Kilmer spoke about his absence from mainstream Hollywood for a decade or more and acknowledged that his career arc had been unusual. He had other interests, he said; he wanted to hang out with his kids.

“I don’t have any regrets,” he said, adding: It’s an adage but it’s kind of true: Once you’re a star, you’re always a star; it’s just, what level?