Val Kilmer, the brooding, versatile actor who played fan favorite Iceman in Top Gun, donned a voluminous cape as Batman in Batman Forever and portrayed Jim Morrison in The Doors, has died. He was 65. Kilmer died during the evening on Tuesday, April 2, in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, said in an email to The Associated Press. Val Kilmer died from pneumonia. He had recovered after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies.
"I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed," he says toward the end of Val, the 2021 documentary on his career. "And I am blessed."
Kilmer, the youngest actor ever accepted to the prestigious Juilliard School at the time he attended, experienced the ups and downs of fame more dramatically than most. His break came in 1984's spy spoof Top Secret! followed by the comedy Real Genius in 1985. Kilmer would later show his comedy chops again in films including MacGruber and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
His movie career hit its zenith in the early 1990s as he made a name for himself as a dashing leading man, starring alongside Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton in 1993's Tombstone, as Elvis' ghost in True Romance and as a bank-robbing demolition expert in Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
The actor – who took part in the Method branch of Suzuki arts training – threw himself into parts. When he played Doc Holliday in Tombstone, he filled his bed with ice for the final scene to mimic the feeling of dying from tuberculosis. To play Morrison, he wore leather pants all the time, asked castmates and crew to only refer to him as Jim Morrison and blasted The Doors for a year.
That intensity also gave Kilmer a reputation that he was difficult to work with, something he grudgingly agreed with later in life, but always defending himself by emphasizing art over commerce.
"In an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each project, an attempt to breathe Suzukian life into a myriad of Hollywood moments, I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every major studio," he wrote in his memoir, I'm Your Huckleberry.