When Val Kilmer was a teenager, performing in high-school plays and making amateur movies with his younger brother, Marlon Brando was his hero. Like Brando, Kilmer eventually moved to New York to study acting, becoming one of the youngest students to be admitted to the Juilliard School's drama program. And years later, after he acted alongside Brando in the infamously disastrous The Island of Dr. Moreau, Kilmer would nonetheless express a twisted kind of admiration for his co-star. "I wouldn't call him normal," he said of Brando on Late Show With David Letterman. "He's a genius. Have you ever met any normal geniuses?"
His commitment to the profession, the intensity of his working process, the curiosity and at times inscrutable logic guiding his choices of roles—all suggested that he knew no masters. Kilmer worked with auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann but turned down offers from David Lynch and Robert Altman. He was Moses and Batman and he starred in not one but two direct-to-video action movies with 50 Cent. As he explained in Val, the 2021 documentary about his life, he was driven by the desire to explore the mysterious space between "where you end and the character begins." Although several obituaries have focused on his well-known roles, Kilmer didn't need to be a leading man for his powers to shine through; his touch was so formidable that you felt it in transience too.
Kilmer started his film career in the comedy films Top Secret! (1984) and Real Genius (1985), before transitioning to dramatic films. He rose to prominence for playing Iceman in Top Gun (1986), Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991), Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), and Batman / Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever (1995). He also gained acclaim for his roles in Willow (1988), Thunderheart (1992), True Romance (1993) and Heat (1995). He later acted in films such as The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), The Saint (1997), The Prince of Egypt (1998), The Salton Sea (2002), Alexander (2004), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), Déjà Vu (2006), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), MacGruber (2010), The Snowman (2017), and Song to Song (2017). Kilmer made his final film appearance in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), reprising his role from the original film.
In 2015, Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer. He subsequently underwent a tracheal procedure that damaged his vocal cords, leaving him with severe difficulty speaking. He also underwent chemotherapy and two tracheotomies, and died of pneumonia in 2025. He released his memoir, I'm Your Huckleberry: A Memoir (2020), and the documentary Val (2021), both of which detail career and health struggles of the actor.