Val Kilmer, the actor who played Batman, Jim Morrison, and Iceman in 'Top Gun,' dies.
In 2015 he was diagnosed with throat cancer, but the cause of the transfer was pneumonia.
BarcelonaVal Kilmer, the actor who played Iceman in Top Gun or Batman in Batman Forever, died Tuesday night in Los Angeles from pneumonia. The 65-year-old singer had been suffering from throat cancer since 2015, a disease he had managed to overcome after extensive treatment. New York Times has reported the news quoting the actor's daughter, Mercedes Kilmer.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Kilmer became one of Hollywood's most promising young actors, appearing in major productions such as Willow (1986), Top Gun (1985), Batman Forever (1995) or The saint (1997), films with a very popular vocation that he combined with other more authorial ones such as biopic about Jim Morrison directed by Oliver Stone, The Doors (1991); the thrillerDouble murder (1989), or the westernTombstone (1993).
His magnetic, almost rock-star physique made him one of the most popular actors of his generation: not just an actor, but a full-fledged Hollywood star almost from his first film appearance. Kilmer made his debut with the extraordinary comedy Top secret! (1984), the parody of the space cinema of ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) in their prime in which the actor displayed a display of charisma and comedy in the role of the young rock'n'roll singer Nick Rivers.
From the theater in Hollywood
Born in Los Angeles in 1959, Kilmer studied at the Juilliard School of Drama and was close to joining the brat pack of young Hollywood actors, but turned down a role in the film Rebels by Francis Ford Coppola. Many years later he would reunite with Coppola in one of the strangest roles of his career, the writer protagonist of the eccentric Twitch (2011), a film in which the director channeled the trauma of losing his son Gian-Carlo and Kilmer the loss of his brother Wesley, who died at the age of 15.
In his early days, Kilmer aimed to be a serious theatrical actor, and even published poetry (dedicated to his girlfriend at the time, Michelle Pfeiffer), but the success of Top secret! shot his career up, just as Tom Cruise did a year later with Top Gun, where Kilmer played a supporting role. However, it has become one of his most iconic roles, especially since he reprised it in the 2022 sequel. Top Gun: Maverick, now voiceless due to throat cancer. This performance, imbued with the experience of a career of ups and downs, was his final role.
Characters like the rogue adventurer of epic fantasy Willow or the master of disguises from the film adaptation of the television series The saint They fit Kilmer like a glove. So did Doc Holliday in the magnificent westernTombstone, one of his most celebrated performances and a favorite of Kilmer himself, who titled his autobiography with his character's emblematic phrase: I'm your Huckleberry.
The Bat and the Rock Star
But the two roles that ended up defining this stage of Kilmer, and surely his career, are those of The Doors and Batman Forever, two films that, however, fell short of their ambitions. Kilmer prepared for the role of Jim Morrison for over a year; he was, after all, one of those characters who could change your life, all charisma and fire, fragility and self-destruction; but despite Kilmer's successful vocal interpretation of the Doors' repertoire, director Oliver Stone's self-indulgence condemned the film to irrelevance.
The Case of Batman Forever It wasn't very different: Kilmer seemed a priori a more suitable actor to play a superhero than Michael Keaton, whom he replaced after both Batman Tim Burton's. But Joel Schumacher's arrival to the franchise, with his injection of pop color and eccentricity, shifted the focus to Batman's gallery of enemies (Jim Carrey's Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones's Two-Face or Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy), and left the spotlight on Uma Thurman). So much so that Kilmer declined to participate in the fourth installment, Batman and Robin.
Although he continued to play good roles –the same year as Batman Forever participated in Heat, he thriller Michael Mann's criminal with De Niro and Pacino - Kilmer's career as a Hollywood star ended with the bankruptcy of The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996) and of Planet Network (2000), two films in which he also gained a well-deserved reputation as an actor difficultFrom then on, the actor focused on independent productions such as Wonderland (2003), in which he played the porn actor John Holmes, or the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black, the wonderful comedy blackKiss Kiss Bang Bang, where Kilmer was a gay private detective with memorable lines.
A Fading Voice
Beginning in the first decade of the 21st century, Kilmer's filmography began to see a proliferation of direct-to-video productions, low-budget genre films in which he seemed the only selling point. The actor seemed increasingly distant from Hollywood when, by chance, he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015. The effects of the disease were already evident in The Snowman (2017), the thriller by Tomas Alfredson in which they had to rewrite his role and dub the actor in many scenes. After two operations, Kilmer had to use a speaker connected to his windpipe in order to speak, but he continues to act in films in which he is simply dubbed by other actors. But not Top Gun: Maverick, where Kilmer's voice was recreated using artificial intelligence.