Val Kilmer, who died at 65 on Tuesday, donned Batman’s cape, starred as a gunslinger, flew supersonic fighter jets in “Top Gun” and held the screen as a bumbling singer in a slapstick comedy about the Cold War.
Kilmer was a leading man in Hollywood during the 1980s and ’90s and then exited stage left for more than a decade. His career was disrupted by throat cancer and a tracheotomy, but he had already left his mark with a series of notable performances.
“Once you’re a star, you’re always a star,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2012.
Here are seven of his most memorable roles:
Kilmer replaced Michael Keaton as Batman, stepping into the film franchise as it transitioned from the gloomy atmosphere of Tim Burton to the campier direction of Joel Schumacher. Kilmer’s Caped Crusader in “Batman Forever” (1995) was stoic enough. But the tone of the film was set early, when Batman’s butler, Alfred, asked him if he needed a sandwich as he got into the Batmobile. “I’ll get drive-through,” Kilmer deadpanned.
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‘Top Gun’
Perhaps Kilmer’s best-known role was Iceman, the cocky pilot who rivals Tom Cruise’s character in “Top Gun” (1986), the adrenaline-pumping film about fighter pilots in training. With aviators on, hair thickly gelled and a crisp white uniform, Iceman is a smooth-talking pilot with skills to match. “It’s the way he flies,” the character Goose says in one scene. “Ice-cold. No mistakes.” Kilmer reprised the role in the 2022 sequel.
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Kilmer plays Robert De Niro’s right-hand man as the two thieves try to pull off heist after heist in a cat-and-mouse game with a police officer played by Al Pacino. “Heat” (1995) has two memorable scenes, an epic shootout and a conversation between Pacino and De Niro in a coffee shop. But as the third fiddle, Kilmer offers up a softer aspect of the film in an oft-quoted conversation with De Niro about his relationship. “Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner,” De Niro advises. “For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man,” Kilmer responds.
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‘The Doors’
One of Kilmer’s most celebrated performances was in the role of Jim Morrison, the musician and frontman of the 1960s rock group The Doors. In the 1991 film, directed by Oliver Stone, Kilmer gave a vividly stylized performance opposite Meg Ryan (who played Pamela Courson, Morrison’s partner). The movie covers the years when Morrison was a film student in Los Angeles through his death in Paris in 1971 at age 27. Kilmer sang his own vocals in the performance, which was widely praised by critics.
‘Tombstone’
Kilmer would later title his memoir after a line he delivers in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western in which he plays the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday. Even as he executes a number of heroic deeds throughout the film, Holliday is a jaundiced, perspiring wreck who is clearly drinking himself to death. “I’m your huckleberry,” Kilmer says, once in an early scene and again in a climactic confrontation.
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‘Top Secret!’
In this 1984 Cold War spy spoof from the creative team behind “Airplane!” Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, a dashing rock ’n’ roller in the Elvis Presley mold who becomes an unwitting cog in a plot to reunite Germany when he is sent to perform at a cultural festival. That plot takes a back seat to laugh-a-minute jokes and sight gags, including an underwater saloon fight and a bookstore sequence that was filmed backward.
As he would do years later in “The Doors,” Kilmer did his own singing. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “At the drop of the merest song cue, Mr. Kilmer is ready to jump atop a nightclub table and suddenly transform a sedate, elegantly dressed crowd into a giant, frenetic production number built around ‘Tutti Frutti.’”
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‘Willow’
Kilmer plays the longhaired, bare-chested warrior Madmartigan, whom the titular character teams up with to guard a baby and defeat an evil queen. It was during the filming of “Willow” (1988) that Kilmer met his wife, Joanne Whalley, whom he later divorced. She played the evil queen’s daughter, and the love interest of Kilmer’s character.
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William Lamb contributed reporting.
