Val Kilmer, an icon of ’80s and ’90s cinema who had a long and brilliant career inside and outside Hollywood’s margins, died on April 1 from pneumonia, per the New York Times. He was 65.
Kilmer’s career started exceptionally hot in the mid-’80s, with roles in the Zucker-Abrhams-Zucker comedy Top Secret!, one of the funniest movies of the post-Airplane! era; Real Genius, which introduced an entire generation to how great Tears for Fears was in their “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” heyday; and Tony Scott’s Top Gun, where he played Iceman, the foil (and later friend) to Tom Cruise’s Maverick. He captured a certain kind of nerd’s heart with his role in Ron Howard’s Willow, a cult fantasy feature that continues to have a fun afterlife among sword and sorcery fans.
The ’90s were even bigger for Kilmer, and he kicked that decade off with a bang in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, where he played frontman Jim Morrison through the highs and lows of the band’s career. He followed that with a three-film run that’s up there with any of the greats — George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone, which instantly cemented his portrayal of Doc Holliday as the definitive representation of that legend on screen; reteaming with Scott to bring Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance to the screen (he played a mystic Elvis who steals every scene he’s in); and Michael Mann’s Heat, one of the all-time-great crime epics.
After that came trouble: he starred in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which was a big success at the time in that moment before fans came to hate fun superhero movies, and starred in the absurdly ill-fated Island of Dr. Moreau alongside Marlon Brando, where everything that could have gone wrong did so. The same year Dr. Moreau came out, Kilmer starred in the updated version of The Saint serials, and it wasn’t successful enough to guarantee future installments. He was never as successful as in his Batman moment, but his later career was full of fascinating work. He appeared in a series of cult classics: Wonderland, where he played infamous porn legend John Holmes, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (an incredible, incredible film), David Mamet’s Spartan, and in Macgruber, which is one of the best SNL movies, if not the best.
This is an abridged version of his career — it was vastly wilder and more interesting than we can put to paper in the space we have here. Yet, following his battle with throat cancer — one that essentially ended his acting career in the 2010s — he wrote one of the best memoirs of any sort that we’ve ever read out of Hollywood. If you’d like to pay appropriate tribute to Val Kilmer in these moments, please check out I’m Your Huckleberry, which is full of profound reflections on his life and the good fortune he had to have talent and work alongside other amazing artists. It’s an astonishing and gorgeous read; we imagine it’s how he’d like to be remembered.
May he rest in peace.