Val Kilmer, the California-born, Juilliard-trained actor who starred in movies together with “Top Gun,” “The Doors,” “Tombstone” and “Batman Forever” and earned a repute as a Hollywood dangerous boy, has died, the New York Times reported. He was 65.
The reason for dying was pneumonia, the paper stated, citing his daughter Mercedes Kilmer.
Kilmer was considered one of Hollywood’s most outstanding main males within the Nineties earlier than quite a few spats with administrators and co-stars and a sequence of flops dented his profession. Over the years, Kilmer gained a repute as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and generally egotistical.
“When certain people criticize 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 advised the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003. “I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”
He made his movie debut starring within the spy spoof “Top Secret!” (1984) earlier than showing within the goofy comedy “Real Genius” (1985). He rocketed to stardom as Tom Cruise’s co-star within the smash 1986 hit “Top Gun” (1986), enjoying naval aviator Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, and a long time later appeared alongside Cruise once more within the 2022 sequel “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Kilmer starred in director Ron Howard’s fantasy “Willow” (1988) and married his British co-star Joanne Whalley, with whom he had two youngsters earlier than divorcing.
One of his most difficult roles got here in director Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991) by which he performed Jim Morrison, the charismatic and finally doomed lead singer of the influential rock band The Doors.
To attempt to persuade Stone to forged him, Kilmer put collectively an eight-minute video of himself singing and looking out like Morrison at varied factors in his life. Kilmer’s personal singing voice is used within the movie.
“The Doors” ushered within the highest-profile years of his profession. In the 1993 Western “Tombstone,” he performed previous west gunfighter Doc Holliday. He had two business successes in 1995, co-starring with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro within the crime drama “Heat” and succeeding Michael Keaton because the Caped Crusader in “Batman Forever,” the third installment within the Batman sequence.
The noisy, bloated and plodding “Batman Forever” was obtained tepidly by critics, and Kilmer was upstaged by co-stars Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Kilmer pulled out of the following Batman film. Director Joel Schumacher known as Kilmer “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”
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