1 day Ago By Mid-day
The first thing I learned, at a very young age, was that if I was to succeed at what I did, I had to be willing to take risks that no one was willing to take Val KilmerVal Kilmer was a notoriously difficult actor—“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that,” Kilmer said.The directors who could cope with that, brought out the best in him.“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.
Kilmer stole scenes from Pacino and DeNiro, even when he had no lines.In contrast, John Frankenheimer, said of him, “I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again,” on the disastrous Island of Dr Moreau.“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,” Kilmer said.
He had a process, the Suzukian style of Method acting—which meant he delved deep into the skin of characters—he was a deeply intense actor.Director Oliver Stone had long wanted to make a biopic of The Doors, focusing on the band’s singer, who had died of a drugs overdose in Paris in 1971.A number of actors were considered, including John Travolta and Richard Gere, before Stone chose Kilmer because of his physical resemblance to Morrison and strong singing voice.
In his trademark single-minded approach, Kilmer lost weight and learned 50 Doors songs by heart, as well as spending time in a studio perfecting Morrison’s stage style.In his 1996 biography of Oliver Stone, James Riordan said the surviving Doors members could not tell recordings of Kilmer singing their songs from Morrison’s original.This was perhaps his best performance combining his skills as a stage actor with a fine singing voice, to bring to life the 1960s-counterculture icon Jim Morrison.
Critic Roger Ebert wrote: “If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Val Kilmer should get it.”He had extraordinary range: excelling in comedies, westerns, crime dramas, musical biopics and action-adventures films alike.“In movies as different as Real Genius, Top Gun, Top Secret! and Tombstone he has shown a range of characters so convincing that it’s likely most people, even now, don’t realise they were looking at the same actor.
” Ebert said.Every actor needs that break out role, that fan favourite part, the one that garners world-wide recognition, for DeNiro it would be Taxi Driver, for Kilmer it was Top Gun, in 1986. With Tom Cruise, he created the iconic “Iceman”.
And 30 odd years later, with Kilmer in the throes of throat cancer, he came back for one final performance in Top Gun Maverick, on Cruise’s insistence.Kilmer also played Elvis Presley in Tony Scott’s True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino, and sickly alcoholic gambler and dentist Doc Holliday in the 1993 film Tombstone—a retelling of the story of Wyatt Earp’s gunfight at the OK Corral, which some critics called his finest performance.Actor Michael Biehn said “What set Kilmer apart from other actors was not only his intelligence, but the way he was able to access different parts of himself and translate them into the characters he played, inspiring his scene partners to step up their own performances in response”Val Kilmer, who died at the age of 65, was often underrated as an actor and erratic as a person, refusing roles, and rubbing studios up the wrong way.
“I don’t really have too much of a notion about success or popularity,” Kilmer said of himself.“I never cultivated fame, I never cultivated a persona, except possibly the desire to be regarded as an actor.”And on his tombstone it will read—What an actor he was.
Val Kilmer (1959-2025).Goodnight, Batman, Iceman, Doc Holliday, Jim Morrison, sleep well. You will always be our Huckleberry.
Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.
com.
