Prolific American actor Val Kilmer, who became famous with ‘Top Gun’ and went on to star in roles as Batman and Jim Morrison, is dead.
Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes, told the New York Times on Tuesday that her father, aged 65 died of pneumonia.
She said Kilmer had battled throat cancer following a 2014 diagnosis but later recovered.
Born Val Edward Kilmer on New Year’s Eve 1959, he began acting in commercials as a child.
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.
In Hollywood, the Los Angeles native longed to make serious films but found himself in a series of schlocky blockbusters and expensive flops in the early 2000s.
Chastened by a decade or more of low-budget movies, he was mounting a comeback in the 2010s with a successful stage show about Mark Twain that he hoped to turn into a film when he was struck by cancer.
‘Val,’ an intimate documentary about Kilmer’s stratospheric rise and later fall in Hollywood, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. It showed him struggling for air after a tracheotomy.
Kilmer “has the aura of a man who was dealt his cosmic comeuppance and came through it,” the US publication Variety wrote of the film.
“He fell from stardom, maybe from grace, but he did it his way.”
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.
Kilmer’s website said he had led a “magical life.”
“For more than half a century, I have been honing my art, no matter the medium. Be it literature, movies, poetry, painting, music, or tracking exotic and beautiful wildlife,” he wrote.
Kilmer is survived by two children, Mercedes and Jack Kilmer.
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