NEW YORK: “If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Val Kilmer should get it,” wrote critic Roger Ebert.

The Hollywood star, famed for roles in seminal films such as Top Gun, The Doors, Heat, The Ghost and the Darkness, has passed away at the age of 65.

Although the actor had lived with poor health for years after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, the cause of his death was pneumonia.

The California-born actor was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men at the height of his career.

Kilmer was the youngest person ever accepted to the drama department at New York’s fabled Juilliard school, and made his Broadway debut in 1983 alongside Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.

He dated Daryl Hannah, Angelina Jolie, Cher and model Cindy Crawford. In 1988, he married Joanne Whalley, whom he had met when they appeared in the fantasy film Willow. The couple had two children but divorced after eight years of marriage.

A versatile character actor who also cultivated a theatre career, he toggled between big-budget successes, commercial flops and smaller independent films after his breakout role in Top Gun opposite Tom Cruise.

When he reprised his role as ‘Iceman’ in the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick, Kilmer’s real-life health issues, and rasp of voice, were written into the character.

“Instead of treating Kilmer — and, indeed, the entire notion of Top Gun — as a throwaway nostalgia object, he’s given a celluloid swan song that’ll stand the test of time,” GQ wrote.

One of Kilmer’s most challenging roles came in director Oliver Stone’s The Doors in which he played Jim Morrison, the charismatic and ultimately doomed lead singer of the rock band. He sang The Doors’ hits himself in the film.

That role ushered in the highest-profile years of his career. In the 1993 Western Tombstone, he played Old West gunfighter Doc Holliday. He had two commercial successes in 1995, co-starring with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the crime drama Heat.

Batman Forever, the third instalment in the Batman series in which he succeeded Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader, was received tepidly by critics in 1995, and Kilmer was upstaged by co-stars Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Kilmer pulled out of the next Batman movie, and later clashed with co-star Marlon Brando during the troubled production of The Island of Dr Moreau, which flopped in 1996.

Over the years, spats with directors and co-stars and a series of high-profile flops dented his career. He gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and sometimes egotistical.

A 1996 Entertainment Weekly cover story dubbed Kilmer ‘The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate’, depicting him as a sometimes surly eccentric with exasperating work habits.

“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 told the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003.

“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”

Francis Ford Coppola, who worked with him for “Twixt”, wrote that Kilmer “was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know”, while “Heat” director Michael Mann also praised his range and “brilliant variability.”

“After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news,” Mann wrote on Instagram.

Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025