Willow. Top Gun. Tombstone. That's just a fraction of Val Kilmer's legendary resume. But off-screen,
his life hasn't been without its ups and downs. From on-set outbursts to brushes with death,
this is his tragic real life story.
Val Kilmer once told The Guardian,
"There's nothing good about divorce."
And he's known that from a young age, as he comes from a broken home himself.
He grew up affluent in Los Angeles, the son of Eugene,
an aerospace equipment distributor and Gladys, a real estate developer. When he was nine,
his parents' marriage crumbled and he went to live with his dad, his older brother Mark,
and his younger brother Wesley. Kilmer has said that the breakup of his family
took a toll on him emotionally and strained his relationship with his father. As he described it,
"I was quiet. More contemplative than outgoing [...] Things didn't go well
between me and my father for a very long time."
It's not clear if Kilmer ever patched up his relationship with his dad.
When Eugene died in 1995, Val had a falling out with his brother
Mark as they battled over their father's estate. In 1996, Mark told People Magazine,
"Val has no example in his life of a good relationship he can look to."
Kilmer's acting journey began when he was accepted into the legendary
Juilliard School in New York City at the age of 16. But just before his time there,
his life changed tragically forever. His younger brother Wesley was an aspiring
director whom he worshipped. As he told The Telegraph in 2004,
"[He] was just an amazing artist. I was sort of in awe of him."
As Val saw it, Wesley was destined to be another Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.
But on the eve of Val's departure to Juilliard, Wesley suffered an epileptic fit and fell into
the family's swimming pool and drowned. As Val recalled to The New York Times,
"I didn't really get back to earth until about two or three years after my brother died.
It's like that Nickelback song, 'I'm sick of sight without the sense of feeling.'"
In 2019, Kilmer memorialized Wesley on Instagram
with a boyhood picture of himself and his siblings, along with the caption,
"Me and my perfect brothers Mark And Wesley."
While Kilmer was at Juilliard, his success was marred by internal misery. He hated the school,
and he rubbed his mentors and colleagues the wrong way. He disdained the rules,
the authoritarian vibe, the formalism, and the silly vocal exercises. Nevertheless,
he flourished. He landed lead parts onstage. He even wrote his own play with some classmates
called How It All Began. Famed theatre producer Joseph Papp caught the play while visiting the
school and liked what he saw. It ran for a month at The Public Theater in New York.
Kilmer was good enough for Broadway, as he landed a role in John Byrne's Slab
Boys. But he was demoted twice, first by a young Kevin Bacon and then by Sean Penn.
Next came Shakespeare's As You Like It in Minneapolis with Tony winner Patti LuPone.
He'd found his calling, but the bitterness that accompanied his success would not relent.
In 2004, Kilmer told The Telegraph,
"I'm a character actor, but I look like a leading man."
Those looks and that mindset made him the perfect choice to play the tortured but beautiful musician
Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic The Doors. The film plots the rocker's rise to rock
stardom and his quick decline into drug abuse and then death at the age of 27. Kilmer is brilliant
in the part, but he began cementing his diva reputation during production while feuding
with Stone about the direction of the film. Or as Stone diplomatically put it to Esquire in 2005,
"He speaks in a way that is propelled from deep inside,
and he doesn't always realize how the things he says will sound to other people."
Kilmer's obsessiveness sometimes pushed some of his colleagues too far.
Actress Caitlin O'Heaney even claims that Kilmer assaulted her during an
audition for The Doors that got out of control. As she told Buzzfeed in 2017,
"When I got to the room Val Kilmer picked me up and shaked me, throwing me down to the floor."
She filed a police report for battery about a month after the audition and was eventually paid a
$24,500 settlement. However, the film's casting director, Risa Bramon Garcia,
believes that O'Heaney's version of events is blown out of proportion,
as the scene itself was supposed to be physical and volatile. As she explained to Buzzfeed,
"I am not somebody who takes this stuff lightly. I can tell the difference between
something that’s abusive and a moment that got carried away."
In the early 90s, Kilmer delivered two of the most acclaimed performances of his career.
In the 1993 western Tombstone, he played the legendarily loquacious Doc Holiday.
He followed that up with the part of a henchman in 1995's Heat,
arguably the best crime thriller of all time. But even character actors are tempted by the cowl.
Kilmer claims that he happened to spend the day in a bat cave when he got the
call to replace Michael Keaton for 1995's Batman Forever. It was a hit, but Kilmer
was a nightmare. Director Joel Schumacher called him, quote, "childish and impossible."
Kilmer developed a reputation for making impossible demands and being rude to co-stars.
While making 1997's The Saint, he reportedly told the crew to avoid eye contact with him.
His Island of Dr. Moreau [maw-ROH] director John Frankenheimer declared,
"I will never climb Mount Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again."
Kilmer later explained his behavior by writing in his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry,
"In an unflinching attempt to empower directors,
actors and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each
project [...] I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every major studio."
"Well … things didn't work out."
Kilmer used his bittersweet Hollywood earnings to purchase a 6,000-acre ranch
in New Mexico. But he quickly became as hated by his neighbors as he was by his
co-stars. He dubbed the area around his ranch, quote, "the homicide capital of the Southwest"
and oddly claimed that 80% of the people in his county were drunk. He also
insulted Vietnam veterans in a 2005 interview with Esquire by calling them,
quote, "borderline criminal or poor." Kilmer's neighbors demanded that he apologize. An
attempt was even made to block permits for the bed-and-breakfast on his property. The matter grew
so heated that it attracted the attention of the New Mexico ACLU, who offered to represent Kilmer.
Kilmer's ranch was his slice of heaven. It's where he proposed to his former wife Joanne Whalley in
1988. But 20 years later, the 2008 financial collapse crushed him. Back taxes mounted,
and he ended up listing all but 14 acres of the property for $33 million in 2009.
He sold to a Texas oil magnate in 2011 for $18.5 million. As he told The New York Times,
"I just lost my home like a million other people. It was pretty awful."
In 2014, Kilmer began having a hard time swallowing. Shortly thereafter,
he was staying in his friend Cher's guest house when he woke up vomiting blood.
Traditional doctors told him it was throat cancer, although his spiritual
advisor claimed that he merely needed to pray the fear away. His health was fading
fast and he was caught in a battle between his Christian Science belief in God as a healer,
and the desperate pleas from his kids to seek more earthly remedies. They pleaded with their stubborn
father to save his own life. He eventually bowed to their pressure. As he told The New York Times,
"I just didn't want to experience their fear,
which was profound. I would've had to go away, and I just didn't want to be without them."
Kilmer got surgery on his throat in 2014, which was followed by chemotherapy and radiation.
The surgery left him with a tracheostomy tube, a feeding tube, and shortness of breath. His
once-booming baritone was reduced to a rasp. In another dark twist of fate, his daughter Mercedes
was hit by a car, leaving her with a scar running down the length of her leg. She joined her father
in the hospital, while Kilmer's son Jack was devastated as he tended to both of their bedsides.
Kilmer wanted to keep his battle with cancer private. But in 2016, when his The Ghost and the
Darkness co-star Michael Douglas was asked about his own fight with the disease, he off-handedly
mentioned Kilmer's illness. Kilmer wasn't pleased as he took to Facebook to deny the story, writing,
"I love Michael Douglas but he is misinformed [...] I [...] have no cancer whatsoever."
But this wasn't exactly true. Kilmer was in remission and making a bit of a semantic argument.
When asked by The New York Times why he denied his diagnosis so vociferously, he simply replied,
"I didn't have cancer. It was a bit like do you have a broken bone? And
if you broke it in high school, you would say no."
In April 2020, Kilmer appeared on Good Morning America and admitted,
"I was diagnosed with throat cancer which healed very quickly."
But in classic Kilmer fashion, he made sure to preface that admission stoically by saying,
"I feel a lot better than I sound, but I feel wonderful."
"What do you miss most about your old voice, Val?"
"That I had one! And that I didn't laugh like a pirate."
In the mid-'90s, Kilmer's relationship with his wife Joanne Whalley was beginning to crumble.
The end was bitter. His shooting schedule had kept them apart,
and by 1996 they'd become so estranged that, as Kilmer recounted to Elle,
"I turned on CNN and found out my wife had filed for divorce.
She took the kids and moved to a different state."
Over the years, Kilmer has been romantically linked to other Hollywood stars, including
Daryl Hannah, Cindy Crawford, and Angelina Jolie. Even Cher came courting. She had
a friend approach Kilmer at a Manhattan restaurant in 1981. He recalled in his memoir,
"Her name shocked me to the point that I spit out my spaghetti while exclaiming, 'No!'"
As for Cher, she told People Magazine in 1984,
"Val is terrific but sometimes it’s just too intense and hot."
But the days of famous women on Kilmer's arm are now long gone. He says that he
hasn't dated anyone in the decades since he split from his wife. He now lives largely
alone on a small portion of what remains of his once-sprawling ranch. As he mourns in his memoir,
"I haven't had a girlfriend in 20 years. The truth is I am lonely part of every day."
Modern medicine may have saved Val Kilmer's life but he's not very happy about the cost.
He's boasted that he could once perform a hundred different voices and endless imitations,
and he believes that it was his treatment that has caused his
suffering. Regarding his hallowed voice, he told The New York Times,
"That's from radiation and chemotherapy. It's not from cancer."
Looking back on his life, Kilmer accepts his fate,
but he also laments how many people he alienated along the way. As he put it,
"Everyone has to work out their own salvation. How to live and by what morality,
and I found that the part that I feel bad about is hurting somebody in the process."
In this reckoning though, he has managed to mend some old wounds.
Kilmer once said sneeringly of one of his Top Gun co-stars,
"You can't make fun of Tom Cruise. Poor thing."
But now with the sequel Top Gun:
Maverick wrapped and their anxious youths behind them, Kilmer has said,
"We're friends. This time we're friends."
Kilmer turned 60 in 2019, and he clearly feels that his prognosis
is good. He says that he had no fear during treatment and has no fear now.
Besides, for someone of his faith, death isn't death, it's just a transition. As he puts it,
"The concept of time is a human one. So,
if you describe the divine concept of time, there is no time."
"How is your health?"
"I'm doing great. I feel a lot better than I sound."
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