How Val Kilmer Lived By His Own Set of Rules: ‘He Was Always Eccentric’

• PEOPLE pays tribute to the Top Gun and Heat actor, who died of pneumonia on April 1.
• Former colleagues including Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer share their memories of the one-of-a-kind Hollywood rebel with PEOPLE.
• “I don’t see that he ever changed. He was always eccentric,” director David Zucker, who worked with Kilmer four decades ago and saw him through the years.

Reporting for his first professional acting job at age 13, Val Kilmer already knew one thing: He would refuse to compromise his artist’s soul — and certainly not for a cheeseburger ad. Especially when it wasn’t even a good cheeseburger.

“The thing tasted like cardboard,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir I’m Your Huckleberry. “The director kept telling me to put my heart into it. I couldn’t. . . . I walked off the set and never appeared in the commercial and never got paid.”

Even though he balked at having to wade into what he referred to as “a sea of Hollywood fluff,”  Kilmer, who died from pneumonia at age 65 in L.A. on April 1, was a Hollywood star and an irresistible sex symbol.

The camera loved the flinty angularity of his jaw, the slope of his nose, the perfect bow shape of his upper lip. In the 1980s and ’90s, he gave iconic performances as Tom Cruise’s cocky rival Iceman in Top Gun (1986), the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever (1995) and Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991).

He didn’t always enjoy the ride — “Fame wasn’t my priority,” he said — and he earned a reputation for being a challenge on-set: Batman director Joel Schumacher described him as “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”

Then, around 2015, when he was in his mid-50s, throat cancer robbed him of his voice. Yet he made a courageous and touching return in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. “Tom wouldn’t make Maverick without him,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “He knew how important Val was.”

The public response to his five-minute scene with Cruise, in which his few whispered lines of dialogue were enhanced by software, was deeply heartening to Kilmer. He seemed ready for a comeback, if on his own idiosyncratic terms. “My dream,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “is to play Frankenstein with Werner Herzog directing.”

Maverick, however, would be the end to his extraordinary career, although he also made a valiant retrospective 2021 documentary, Val, with his son Jack, 29, reading the narration.

“We are so proud of him and honored to see his legacy celebrated,” Jack and sister Mercedes, 33, whom Kilmer shared with actress Joanne Whalley, 63, his ex-wife, said in a statement after his death.

Another emotional tribute was paid, not surprisingly, by Cruise. At the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas on April 3, the star asked for a moment of silence. “I really can’t tell you how much I admired his work,” Cruise said, “how much I thought of him as a human being.”

Kilmer considered Cruise a friend — they exchanged holiday gifts — even if at times he’d been known to roll his eyes at Cruise’s steely command of his own career. Asked once if he’d ever made jokes about the superstar, Kilmer answered, “You can’t make fun of Tom Cruise. Poor thing.”

But that was Kilmer, unpredictable, ungovernable, never boring. Cher, one his most famous lovers, once described him to PEOPLE as “really thrilling and funny” and up for “crazy things.”

When Kilmer auditioned to play a rocker turned spy for 1984’s Top Secret!, the comedy that made him a star, he performed an impromptu Elvis impersonation that was “incredible,” says co-director David Zucker.

During the filming of the 1993 western Tombstone, writer Kevin Jarre recalled, he and Kilmer were deep in conversation about the actor’s character, Doc Holliday, when a stand-in “brought over a very colorful sort of locust and said, ‘Look what I found!’ . . . Val, without saying a word, grabbed the locust from the guy and ate it. And it was big.”

As a kid in Los Angeles’s Chatsworth neighborhood, growing up on a property that had once belonged to cowboy star Roy Rogers, Kilmer began studying acting in grammar school, already dreaming of emulating Hollywood’s eccentric nonpareil, Marlon Brando.

He was the son of Eugene Kilmer, a real estate developer, and homemaker Gladys, whom Kilmer described as lovely but remote, “as enigmatic to me as Ingrid Bergman.”

The middle of three boys, he shared an artistic sensibility with younger brother Wesley, although he claimed that Wesley was the “genius.” (With a precocious talent for directing, he cast Val in home movies.) At Chatsworth High, Kilmer was a theater standout whose classmates included Mare Winningham, his first girlfriend.

One of the youngest students ever admitted to the Juilliard School, Kilmer was just heading off to New York City to start classes when he learned that Wesley, who had epilepsy, had died back home: He suffered a seizure in a Jacuzzi and drowned at the age of 15.

The family’s Christian Science faith helped Kilmer go on—as it would years later when cancer struck—but Wesley’s death never stopped haunting him. “I want my brother alive,” he wrote in his memoir, “physically not just spiritually.”

After Juilliard, Kilmer’s path to success was relatively smooth. He had hits with Top Secret! and another silly comedy, Real Genius (1985), then became a major star in the blockbuster Top Gun.  He always claimed he hadn’t even wanted to audition, but “when I finally saw the film for the first time . . . I jumped up after the first five minutes and yelled, ‘This is a hit!’ ”

His next hit, the fantasy-adventure Willow, introduced him to British actress Whalley, his costar, whom he wed in 1988. It was his only marriage in a long line of relationships and friendships with glamorous stars including Daryl Hannah, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cindy Crawford. He once quipped, “I wish I’d been as dedicated to my career as I was to women.”

Over the next decade Kilmer was in his prime. For The Doors he spent a year honing his startling physical closeness to doomed bacchanalian rocker Morrison. Batman Forever was another smash, although he hated being trapped in that heavy, molded costume: “It was frustrating,” he said, “until I realized that my role in the film was just to show up and stand where I was told to.”

Kilmer and Whalley split in 1995, the same year the L.A. crime classic Heat, his last great film, was released. After that, his roles lost some glimmer. The 1996 horror film The Island of Dr. Moreau was a legendary disaster, even though it paired Kilmer with his idol Brando. According to Batman director Schumacher, Brando got so annoyed with Kilmer that he scolded him: “Young man, don’t confuse your ego with the size of your salary, ever.”

Having a lone-wolf reputation, he came to realize, had its drawbacks. “It’s a very social business,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I never tried to be involved in the community.” As his leading-man career faded, he devoted more time to his painting hobby and to touring in a cherished project, a one-man show about Mark Twain.

Then, about 10 years ago, after ignoring a lump in his throat that made swallowing difficult, he awoke in bed vomiting blood. Diagnosed with throat cancer, he underwent chemotherapy and radiation that prolonged his life but left him unable to eat or speak except through a tracheostomy hole.

“Sometimes I feel so low and I have the blues really, really hard,” he told People in 2021. But he rallied, thanks to his faith and the support of his kids. “He can’t be stopped,” Jack told PEOPLE. “He wants to go out there and be the best that he can be.”

Zucker ran into Kilmer about a year ago. They chatted and Kilmer still had that same spark, according to Zucker: “I don’t see that he ever changed. He was always eccentric.”

Towards the end of his life, Kilmer — who was never better than in Maverick — may have have begun to reassess his feelings about that “sea of fluff.”

“I was too serious,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. He even confessed that he’d have appreciated more recognition. With five MTV Award nominations and four Razzie nominations but no Oscar nods, he was right to feel overlooked. “I would like to have more Oscars than anybody,” he said. “Meryl Streep must feel pretty good, you know? . . . It’s about being loved.”