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  4. I once flew back from Nairobi in 1st class next to him. It was an overnight flight and BA had recently introduced the seats that transformed into a flat bed. So, technically, I have slept with Val Kilmer.

    He wore Dangermouse socks which impressed me greatly. He seemed very unassuminng and pretty cool. He was the very definition of good looking as well.

    He has been excellent in some great films although I struggled with Top Gun. Seeing him in the recent Top Gun reboot was quite a shock.

    • Rest in peace, Val Kilmer. What a fine actor. Soundtrack to a movie Top Secret is released on RSD in ten days. First half Val Kilmer singing, second half composer Maurice Jarre.

  6. Remember shooting a TV commercial in Sydney in the late 1990s. The Aussie sparks guy on the shoot had previously worked with VK and Marlon B (both routinely described as “difficult’) on the disastrous (“troubled”) Island of Dr.Moreau shoot in – IIRC – PNG. He described VK as a “right cunt”.

    While he was a terrific actor when he wanted to be (Kiss! Kiss! Bang! Bang!) with Robert Downey Jr was a terrific movie, think his career suffered as a result of his reputation

    Anyway, RIP Val Kilmer

  7. ‘Most def, mos definitely, the rap sheet
    The new release, time to make cream, time to take a piece,
    And at the same time, time to build, time is rilla
    I swear I bring the heat, the tracks to Val Kilmer.’

    Scritti Politti – Tinseltown to the Boogie.

  8. The first time I ever heard of Val Kilmer was when Willow was in cinemas, and the trailer seemed to be shown in every ad break with its repeated growl, ‘Val Kilmer …in Willow’. Except the line was read over shots of Warwick Davis as the title character. I had never heard of him either, so I got it into my head that Val Kilmer was the actor who played Willow. A while later I read that Jim Morrison was making his Doors film, and thought that the Val Kilmer in my head was an extremely bold piece of casting as Jim Morrison.

    • @Gatz

      It wouldn’t be the first time a studio who had “problems” with the talent involved in the film did something like that to get their own back.

      The studio for whom Orson Welles shot Magnificent Ambersons apparently butchered the final cut of the movie, Something similar happened to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee

      FWIW, given the Belfast Cowboy’s diminutive stature, I think Warwick Davis would be far better to playing Jim’s brother Van

      • Welles was his own worst enemy, he disappeared to South America on another project leaving The Magnificent Ambersons before the final edit was done so the studio took over

        Still an excellent film even if it was butchered and given a different ending

        Btw took my daughter to see Citizen Kane on the big screen last week. She loved it (so did I)

  9. When I look at the films he’s been in, apart from The Doors, I think either I’d forgotten he was in those films or hadn’t really thought about his presence much at all. I guess he was kind of a bland non-entity in my mind. RIP!

    I think Top Gun Maverick is brilliant for what it is. Great entertainment if you like that sort of thing, which I do. The original I couldn’t bring myself to tackle. It remains that way.

  10. I never saw the Top Gun films but I thought he held his own in Heat, when all the focus was on the two big names. We lived in Moscow when The Saint was filmed there. A building directly accross the river from our appartment was set on fire as part of the filming – I think it was supposed to stand in for the US embassy.

    Nice quote from him here that I stumbled accross on social media this morning…can’t vouch for it’s veracity, mind…

    “I once tickled Lou Reed. I regretted it for the longest while as he spoke to me few times after that dinner. But I’m glad now. He needed it.”

    • Yep, I liked his performance in Heat. While I really like the film overall, it was unfortunate that it arrived at the stage when Pacino was in full bug-eyed shouty “BIG ASS!!” mode and De Niro was all tics and tricks. He’s great in Kiss Kiss. I find it hard to imagine watching Tombstone and forgetting he’s in it. Not seen most of his other films, I admit, but, round our way, his immortality is sealed by his presence in MacGruber.
      Incidentally, in idle moments, one imagines bad things that might happen, but his last years having difficulty just speaking – I know there are plenty of worse things, but that’s a nasty one I never even thought of..

  11. I remember him for being married to Joanne Whalley ( of Edge of Darkness/ Singing Detective fame) for some time. As for his films, maybe he couldn’t handle success and fully develop his talent, but it’s sad news.

  12. Big fan, particularly of his early career run; his first dozen movies include Top Secret, Real Genius, Willow, Top Gun, The Doors, True Romance and Tombstone, a Batman film and Heat. That’s some going.

    What effectively cost him was the next four: The Island of Dr Moreau, Dead Girl, Ghost and the Darkness and The Saint. His lead man credentials cruelly squandered, when you get the sense he had so much more to give.

    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a happy late career return to form, and then you get the throat cancer diagnosis, with only a brief but lovely scene in Maverick as a kind of goodbye.

    I will defend Top Gun from the slander above. It’s a brilliant Hollywood movie, and it’s laugh out loud funny. Kilmer was perfect as Iceman, and can boast of being the only actor in history to have successfully played both Elvis and Jim Morrison while also participating in the most iconic volleyball scene in the history of cinema.

    A career over too soon. A life over too soon. Look up “legend” in the dictionary, you know what you find? The definition of the word “legend”, which he fucking was. So long, Val.

    • Nicely put, and I agree about his four-movie slump. He went from being quite a big deal, if not major A-lister, to someone with a reputation for being “difficult” and starring in so-so films that probably cost him bigger roles.

      Knowing his story, I thought the scene in Maverick was moving and rather lovely. I have no idea if Tom Cruise and Val were mates in real life, but it certainly came across like two really close comrades catching up on a whole lifetime. I suppose that’s good acting and movie-star charisma, but it worked very well.

      RIP.

  13. About 30 years ago I once sold him some expensive hardback Shakespeare books in the bookshop I worked in in Oxford. I had no idea why he was there at the time but Google tells me he was probably filming the Saint, a film I’ve never seen (has anyone?). At the time he was in a high-profile relationship with someone very famous which was public knowledge back then but I have since forgotten (Google again tells me it was possibly Cindy Crawford).

    Anyway, the woman he was canoodling with and buying the expensive books for was definitely not Cindy Crawford or whoever he was publicly linked with at the time. So I had some good gossip to share in the pub that evening which went down well and I imagine he enjoyed his sojourn in Oxford.

    Love both Top Secret and Heat and he was great in both despite being at the opposite ends of the spectrum so fair play to him. Dealt a difficult hand in the last decade which he seems to have dealt with with dignity. RIP the most famous person I’ve sold hardback Arden Shakespeare to.

  14. Not sure I have seen it mentioned much (if at all) in the tributes but one of his standout films is Spartan, a tense, tricky thriller scripted by David Mamet. Well worth seeking out.

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