Val Kilmer is gone. High, outline of the sharp eyes and Viking magnetism – a heritage perhaps of the Swedish descendants of the mother Gladys and Northeuropus of the father Eugene Dorris – in the 1980s was one of the most representative icons of Hollywood. Top Gun, The Doors, Batman Forever, of course. But also Heat – The challenge, the heart of thunder, Tombstone. Today, however, Kilmer is gone, who disappeared on April 1, 2025 due to a pneumonia, said his daughter Mercedes Kilmer as reported by The New York Times. He was 65 years old and since 2014 he fought with a throat cancer that had deprived him of the voice but from which he had managed to recover.

Kilmer, anti-star who after the huge success lived away from the spotlight looking for a refuge in an immense ranch in New Mexico (subsequently reduced) started his path on theatrical stages. He was born in Los Angeles on December 31, 1959 and was formed in the renowned Juilliard School in New York, of which he was one of the youngest students ever allowed, after sharing the high school desks with Kevin Spacey and with the actress and songwriter Sea Winningham.

The beginning and the first successes

At the beginning of his career as an actor, Kilmer does some advertising and the first real work outside the theater dates back to 1983 in an episode of the television program ABC Afterschool Special, an educational show, in which a young Michelle Pfeiffer also appears. The first lights of the limelight arrive the following year, when he is chosen as the protagonist of the top secret comedy of action!, Where he plays a rocker who travels in Eastern Germany in an attempt to reunite the country with his songs, which Kilmer really sings in the film.

An experience that will certainly return to him. Some time later, in 1991, Oliver Stone chooses him to play Jim Morrison in the Doors, a long -surrendered film and for which Kilmer tries in a manic preparation. He dresses and behaves like the singer for months and months, before giving soul and body to a character capable of hypnotize with his sensual performance and his voice almost identical to that of the true Morrison even the former members of the band.

In the middle, however, Kilmer conquers the status of Hollywood’s nascent star of Hollywood alongside in 1986 Tom Cruise in the Tony Scott top Gun, great commercial success with a high testosterone coefficient. A role that also projects him to Willow (1988) by Ron Howard and then in works such as the new western heart of Thono (1992) by Michael Apted, in which he is a young FBI agent who investigates a native reserve, and in the real Western Tombstone (1993) by George P. Cosmatos.

Batman and the second half of the nineties

Also in 1993 he has a small but unforgettable part in the Elvis style in a life to the maximum, always by Tony Scott on Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino. But 1995 is the year in which Kilmer chooses to dress Batman’s cloak, left in disuse by Michael Keaton after the actor refused to return a third time in the role of the bat man due to creative differences. Some time before Joel Schumacher, the future director of Batman Forever, saw Tombstone and was impressed by Kilmer, who was then hired as a new Bruce Wayne. The film is a commercial success, even if it receives warm opinions from critics. Kilmer, at the time notoriously angular and not always affable, chose not to continue in the guise of Batman, who then moved on to George Clooney, probably also because of a turbulent relationship with Schumacher.

1995, however, is the year in which Kilmer also participates in one of the largest and most important films of the last century, Heat – Michael Mann’s challenge. A neo noir Tesissimo, set in a Los Angeles that is a pleasure for the eyes and a palpitation for the chest, in which it shares the scene with two legendary stars such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. 1996 is then another full year, in which he reads Marlon Brando alongside the little appreciated and above all troubled the lost island of John Frankenheimer, a production of tensions on the set, and Michael Douglas in The spirits of the darkness of Stephen Hopinks. At the end of the ninety, they then also include the least pretentious action film The saint of Philip Noyce, excellent success at the box office, and the Prince of Egypt, in which Double Moses.

The 2000s

In the 2000s, the renowned difficult character inside and out of the sets began to shorten his career early and put a strain on the benevolence of the American film industry. In 2002 he appeared in the thriller Salton Sea – Dj Caruso’s nightmares and lies, in whose protagonist Kilmer confesses to having dragged the elaboration of a loss that accompanied him for most of his life, that of the youngest brother Wesley, drowned in the pool in 1977.

In 2004 he still worked with Oliver Stone in the Kolossal Alexander and was chosen by David Mamet for his Spartan. But in the meantime, many small and independent productions also begin to hurry in its path, in a slow descending in the underground plans of Hollywood with poorly relevant films and often intended for a distribution directly on home video.

He starred in 2005 with Robert Downey Jr. – who said that he financed Kilmer at the beginning, only to become a friend of it – in Kiss Bang Bang of Shane Black, and then he manages to collaborate with an author like Werner Herzog in the bad lieutenant – Last call to New Orleans in 2009. In 2011 he snatches another satisfaction by working for the first time with his friend Francis Ford That after Kilmer’s refusal to act in the boys of the 56th road of 1983, he chooses him as the protagonist for the mistreated Twixt, one of the director’s most decomposed films, yet one of his most intimate, film processing at a distance of decades of the loss of his son Gian Carlo.

Also in the ten years, Kilmer began to stage Citizen Twain for the United States, a theatrical performance written and prepared for a long time and focused on Mark Twain, long -term fixation of the actor. Still twain finds himself playing in a 2014 film, Jo Kastner’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn.

In 2021, forty years after the beginning of his career, Val di Leo Scott and Ting Poo arrives, documentary film told through numerous archive materials and narrated by the son of the actor Jack Kilmer, presented at the Cannes Film Festival and winner of several prizes, including a critic Choice for the best historical or biographical documentary. The last cinematographic appearance dates back to the following year, 2022, with a short and moving cameo in Top Gun: Maverick by Joseph Kosinski, in which Kilmer returns again alongside Tom Cruise in the role of an fatigued admiral Iceman. A tribute that closes a life bringing it back, where it all started.