Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes said that the cause of death was pneumonia, following throat cancer.
Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, Batman Forever and The Doors, has died at the age of 65.
Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes told the New York Times that the cause of death was pneumonia, following throat cancer which was diagnosed in 2014.
He made his feature debut in a 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.
Born in Los Angeles in 1959, Kilmer was one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting programme at the Juilliard School, aged 17.
Acting career
He started out as a stage actor and rose to prominence in the late 1980s with his roles in movie comedies Top Secret! and Real Genius before landing a role as Iceman in the box office smash Top Gun.
Kilmer also 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.
Kilmer 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.
ALSO READ: James Earl Jones: Voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa dies at 93
Other movies
Kilmer was the youngest person ever accepted to New York’s fabled Juilliard school and longed to make serious films. But he 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.
Doccie
Val, a documentary about his stratospheric rise and later fall in Hollywood showed him rasping for air, premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2021.
Kilmer recently returned to movie theatres in 2021 with a cameo reprising his role as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 hit.
ALSO READ: George Foreman: The man beyond the ring, with 5 marriages and 5 sons called ‘George’
