The China Mail - 'Top Gun' and Batman star Val Kilmer dies aged 65

The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Mercedes Kilmer told the New York Times on Tuesday, which was the first publication to announce the news.

He battled throat cancer after being diagnosed in 2014 and appeared in the "Top Gun" sequel and a 2021 documentary appearing physically diminished and with a raspy voice.

His film credits include blockbusters such as Oliver Stone's "The Doors," in which he played Jim Morrison, as well as a short-lived stint as Batman in "Batman Forever" in 1995 opposite Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones.

"Once you're a star, you're always a star. It's just 'what level?'" he told the Hollywood Reporter in an interview in 2012.

"And I was in some big, wonderful movies and enjoyed a lot of success, but I didn’t sort of secure that position."

- Tributes-

A versatile character actor who also cultivated a theatre career, he toggled between big-budget successes, commercial flops and smaller independent films after his breakout role in "Top Gun" opposite Tom Cruise.

Kilmer was superbly cast playing the cocky, square-jawed and mostly silent fighter pilot-in-training Tom "Iceman" Kazansky in the 1986 box office smash hit.

After a cameo in Quentin Tarantino-written "True Romance," Kilmer also went on to star alongside Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in "Heat".

But he developed a reputation as a difficult actor who sometimes clashed with directors and co-stars.

A 1996 Entertainment Weekly cover story dubbed Kilmer "The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate," depicting him as a sometimes surly eccentric with exasperating work habits.

"Hollywood and our business, it's a very social business, and I never tried to be involved in the community of it," he conceded in a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Tributes flowed in on Tuesday from some of his past directors, however.

Francis Ford Coppola, who worked with him for "Twixt", wrote that Kilmer "was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know", while "Heat" director Michael Mann also praised his range and "brilliant variability."

"After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news," Mann wrote on Instagram.

The official "Top Gun" account on X posted a picture of Kilmer as Iceman, saying he had left an "indelible cinematic mark".

- ' Magical life' -

Born Val Edward Kilmer on New Year's Eve 1959, he began acting in commercials as a child.

Kilmer was the youngest person ever accepted to the drama department at New York's fabled Juilliard school, and made his Broadway debut in 1983 alongside Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.

Having fallen out of favor after the turn of the century, he was mounting a comeback in the 2010s with a successful stage show about Mark Twain that he hoped to turn into a film when he was struck by cancer.

"Val," an intimate documentary about Kilmer's stratospheric rise and later fall in Hollywood, premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2021 and showed him struggling for air after a tracheotomy.

It also hinted at his frustration at signing autographs at conventions which, as he put it, was like "selling his old self."

When he reprised his role as "Iceman" in the long-awaited sequel "Top Gun: Maverick," Kilmer's real-life health issues, and rasp of voice, were written into the character.

"Instead of treating Kilmer -- and, indeed, the entire notion of Top Gun -- as a throwaway nostalgia object, he's given a celluloid swan song that'll stand the test of time," GQ wrote.

On his website, Kilmer had described himself as leading a "magical life."

"For more than half a century, I have been honing my art, no matter the medium. Be it literature, movies, poetry, painting, music, or tracking exotic and beautiful wildlife," he wrote.

According to the Times, he is survived by two children, Mercedes and Jack Kilmer.

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