Val Kilmer, movie star who played Batman and Jim Morrison, died at 65 – The Mercury News

By Bruce WeberThe New York Times

Val Kilmer, a local Hollywood actor who tasted the celebrity of the first man as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose procedural gifts and elusive personality also made him a high -level support player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65 years old.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Val Kilmer received a diagnosis of throat cancer in 2014 and then recovered, she said.

Large and beautiful in a rock-star way, Kilmer was actually thrown like a rocker a handful of times at the start of his career, when he seemed intended for successful success. He made his debut in a parody of the spy film of the Slapstick Cold War, “Top secret!” (1984), in which he played as an American singer who plunged the crowd in Berlin in Berlin involuntarily involved in an oriental German plot to bring the country together.

He gave a stylized performance in a lively way as Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in “The Doors” by Oliver Stone (1991), and he played the role of Camée de Mentor – an Elvis who gives advice as imagined by the anti -heroic protagonist of the film, played by Christian Slater – in “True Romance” (1993) violent.

Kilmer had the best invoicing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), playing an unavied FBI agent investigating on an Indian reserve of the southern Dakota, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller on a thief of Débonair, ingenious playing cat and mouse with the Russian crowd. The most famous, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney, he lived in the title role (and the combination) in “Batman Forever” (1995), making a battle at Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), although neither kilmer nor the film are considered as stellar representatives.

“The serious audience will be less interested than ever by what is under the Cape of Batman or the hood,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. “There is not much to contemplate here beyond the spectacle of Gimmicky accessories and the kitsch of good actors (who have recently done a better job elsewhere) dressed for a red-heated Halloween.”

But at that time, another, perhaps more interesting, the strain of Kilmer’s career had developed. In 1986, Scott threw him into his first big budget film, “Top Gun” (1986), the adventure drama fueled by testosterone on naval pilots in training, in which Kilmer played the cool and arrogant rival of the star of the film, Tom Cruise. It was a role that created a precedent for many of the other prominent appearances of kilmer as a co-star or a member of a star set.

He was part of a flight gang at “Heat” (1995), a contemporary story of urban “High Midi” which was a vehicle for Robert de Niro as a brain of a burglary and Al Pacino as a cop that pursues him. He was co-star, billed under Michael Douglas, in “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), a period of the lion hunting in Africa from the end of the 19th century. In “Pollock” (2000), with Ed Harris as a painter Jackson Pollock, he was another artist, Willem de Kooning. He played Philip de Macedonia, the father of Alexandre Le Grand (Colin Farrell), in the grandiose epic of Oliver Stone “Alexander” (2004).

Throughout his career, Kilmer has often left an impression, with viewers as well as filmmakers, unpredictability.

“Most of the actors recognize that there is something different in Val that Meet The Eye,” said Stone in an interview of 2007 for a segment of the television series “Biography”. David Mamet, the playwright and scriptwriter who made Kilmer in the political thriller “Spartan” (2004), added: “What Val has as an actor is something that the actors really, really great, that is to say that they look like improvisation”.

On the screen, he was both charismatic and curiosity, an actor who did not let his characters easily give emotional clues. Outside the screen, he had his share of disagreements, especially at the start of his career, when he acquired a reputation for rupture and self-involvement. A 1996 cover article about him in Entertainment Weekly was entitled “The Hollywood man likes to hate”.

“He offended people by being difficult to understand,” said Stone, one of the many people over the years who said Kilmer had turned them off before putting them back. Robert Downey Jr., who played with Kilmer in the mystery of Wry 2005 murder “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, admitted in the “biography” segment that he could not bear it during their first meeting, although they finally became great friends.

“I’m sure it cannot be news for you that it is chronically eccentric,” said Downey.

Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles on December 31, 1959 and grew up in the catworth district in the far northwest of the city, where his neighbors were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and his high school classmates were Kevin Spacey and Mare Winingham. His father, Eugene, a real estate developer, and his mother, the former Gladys Ekstadt, divorced at the age of 9. His younger brother Wesley drowned in a swimming pool in 1977, an event that haunted kilries for years later.

His memories of this loss were at the center of his performance in “The Salton Sea” (2002), about a man conducted by guilt and the research of redemption after having witnessed the murder of his wife and not being able to save her. “There are several points in the film where the guy simply cannot continue,” said kilmer in an interview with the New York Times in 2002. “I did not really return to earth before about two or three years after the death of my brother.”

He applied to the Juilliard School in New York and, at 17, became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the actor program there. At Juilliard, he and several classmates have written and played “How It All Begin”, adapted from the autobiography of the Urban West-German urban guerrillas Michael Baumann. In 1981, after having graduated from kilmer, he appeared in a professional production of the play to the theater.

He made his debut in Broadway in 1983 in “The Slab Boys”, a John Byrne drama on young workers in a Scottish carpet factory which also presented Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. Later, he played Hamlet at Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder in 1988 and to the male leader, Giovanni, opposite Jeanne Tripplehorn in a public theater production of the Jacobée tragedy Luride “Tis Pice she is a whore”, directed by Joanne Akalaitis, in 1992.

Kilmer’s wedding with actress Joanne Whalley, whom he met on the set of the fantastic children’s film by Ron Howard “Willow” (1988), ended with the divorce. His survivors include their children, Mercedes and Jack. Kilmer lived in a ranch near Santa Fe for many years and once thought about the governor of New Mexico.

The other significant film credits of Kilmer include “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996), a horror film based on a first novel by HG Wells; “Wonderland” (2003), a murder story based on a real crime in which he played the star of pornography John Holmes; And “Twixt” (2011), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, about a horror writer whose book tour takes him to a frightening city haunted by a murder of children.

Like his colleague actor Hal Holbrook, Kilmer has had a long -standing fascination for Mark Twain, and he spent many years looking for and writing a single man’s play, “Citizen Twain”, which he started playing throughout the country in 2010. (Kilmer, who had trouble managing his weight, gave his interest to Twain for having finally helped him.

He also appeared to be Twain in a 2014 Twain’s 2014 film adaptation, “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn”, and he planned to make and play in a film he wrote on Twain and Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who founded Christian Science, whom Twain criticized several times. Kilmer was a Christian scientist.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, Kilmer spoke of his absence of traditional Hollywood for a decade or more and recognized that his career arc had been unusual. He had other interests, he said; He wanted to spend time with his children.

“I have no regrets,” he said, adding: it’s an adage but it’s a bit true: once you are a star, you are still a star. What level is it?