Val Kilmer (1959–2025)

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.

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 the 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 Jim Morrison, the frontman for the rock group the Doors and an 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), in which he played an unseasoned F.B.I. 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 neitherKilmer nor the film was viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.

But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Mr. Kilmer’s career had developed as he was cast in “Top Gun” (1986), the testosterone-fuelled adventure drama about Navy fighter pilots in training, in which he played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of Mr. 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”.

Kilmer 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.

It was the first time Hollywood heavyweights Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared the silver screen. Penned and directed by Michael Mann, this American drama has since secured its spot in the annals of cinema as one of the finest heist films ever made.

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 the painter Jackson Pollock, he was a fellow artist, Willem de Kooning. And he played Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), in Oliver Stone’s grandiose epic “Alexander” (2004).

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.”

Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 1959, and grew up in the Chatsworth neighbourhood in the far northwest part of the city, where his neighbour’s 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, Gladys (Ekstadt) Kilmer, divorced when Val was 9. A younger brother, Wesley, drowned in a swimming pool in 1977, an event that haunted Kilmer for years.

His memories of that loss were at the centre of his performance in “The Salton Sea” (2002), about a man driven by guilt who seeks redemption after witnessing the murder of his wife and not being able to save her.

He applied to the Juilliard School in New York and at 17 became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting programme there. At Juilliard, he and several classmates wrote and performed “How It All Began,” adapted from the autobiography of the 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, with a cast that included Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. He later played Hamlet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder in 1988 and, in 1992, 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.

Like his fellow actor Hal Holbrook, Mr. Kilmer had a longstanding 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.

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

Val Kilmer was often underrated as an actor. He had extraordinary range: excelling in comedies, westerns, crime dramas, musical biopics and action-adventures films alike. And perhaps his best performance combined his skills as a stage actor with a fine singing voice, to bring to life 1960s-counterculture icon Jim Morrison, in Oliver Stone's film The Doors. If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Val Kilmer should get it. In movies as different as Real Genius, Top Gun, Heat, Top Secret!, he has shown a range of characters so convincing that it's likely most people, even now, don't realise they were looking at the same actor.