Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and Batman Forever, dead at 65

Val Kilmer, the brooding, versatile actor who played fan favourite Iceman in Top Gun, donned a voluminous cape as in Batman Forever and portrayed Jim Morrison in The Doors, has died. 

He was 65.

Kilmer died Tuesday night in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, said in an email to The Associated Press. The New York Times was the first to report his death on Tuesday.

The renowned actor died from pneumonia. He had recovered after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies.

"I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed, he said toward the end of Val, the 2021 documentary on his career. And I am blessed." The lines in the film were delivered by his son Jack, who voiced the part of his father in the film because of his inability to speak.

Kilmer experienced the ups and downs of fame more dramatically than most. His break came in 1984's spy spoof Top Secret! followed by the comedy Real Genius in 1985. Kilmer would later show his comedy chops again in films, including MacGruber and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. 

His movie career hit its zenith in the early 1990s as he made a name for himself as a leading man, starring alongside Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton in 1993's Tombstone, as Elvis Presley's ghost in True Romance and as a bank-robbing demolition expert in Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. 

"While working with Val on Heat I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val's possessing and expressing character," director Michael Mann said in a statement Tuesday night. 

Kilmer — who took part in the Method branch of Suzuki arts training — threw himself into parts. When he played Doc Holliday in Tombstone, he filled his bed with ice for the final scene to mimic the feeling of dying from tuberculosis. 

To play Morrison, he wore leather pants all the time, asked castmates and crew to only refer to him as "Jim" and blasted The Doors' music for a year. 

That intensity also gave Kilmer a reputation that he was difficult to work with, something he grudgingly agreed with later in life, but always defending himself by emphasizing art over commerce. 

"In an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors and other collaborators to honour the truth and essence of each project, an attempt to breathe Suzukian life into a myriad of Hollywood moments, I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every major studio," he wrote in his memoir, I'm Your Huckleberry. 

But Phillip Noyce, who directed him in The Saint, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997 that "the real Val Kilmer is a lamb," while praising him for his work ethic.

One of his more iconic roles — hotshot pilot Tom (Iceman) Kazansky opposite Tom Cruise — almost didn't happen.