Val Kilmer, best known for playing Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever and Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone‘s The Doors, has died. He was 65.
Kilmer had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, which he recovered from, she added. In 2021, a documentary titled Val, which followed his life, career, and his health issues, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews.
Kilmer was one of Hollywood’s biggest actors in the 1990s before spats with directors and co-stars and a series of flops dented his career. Over the years, Kilmer gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and sometimes egotistical.
“When certain people criticise me for being demanding, I think that’s a cover for something they didn’t do well. I think they’re trying to protect themselves,” Kilmer told the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003.
“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles in 1959, Kilmer started out in theatre and made his film debut in Jim Abrahams’s spy spoof Top Secret! in 1984. He then went on to appear in the science fiction comedy Real Genius the following year.
Kilmer reportedly turned down a role in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when he was cast as LT Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in the action film Top Gun alongside Tom Cruise, which turned Kilmer into a bona fide star.
“I said no to Robert Altman twice, and David Lynch, although David Lynch I remember, because the second film I turned down was Blue Velvet because it was really graphic and I was just too shy back then,” he said.
Kilmer went on to star in Ron Howard’s fantasy film Willow in 1988, where he met his wife Joanne Whalley, whom he had two children with before they divorced in 1996.
One of Kilmer’s most memorable roles was playing Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Kilmer reportedly recorded an eight-minute audition tape to convince Stone to cast him. He then lost weight and spent six months training his singing voice for the film, going on to perform 15 of the 50 songs he rehearsed for the film.
After Michael Keaton dropped out of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, Kilmer stepped in. While the film opened to mixed reviews, the film went on to become a box office success, grossing over $336m.
“Everything was different about this job than I’d experienced before. The size of the character and how strange it was that Michael Keaton had decided not to do it – I just said yes, without reading the script,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 1995.
However, the on-set problems Kilmer became known for started to become apparent.
While Schumacher reportedly said he believed “Val Kilmer was the best Batman”, he also said: “Val is the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with. The tools I used working with him – tools of communication, of patience and understanding – were the tools I use on my 5-year-old godson. Val is not just high-strung. I think he needs help.”