The Tragic Real Life Story Of Val Kilmer

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Val Kilmer's first acting job was a TV ad for hamburgers. He walked off the set because he could not get into his character's "motivation," according to The Telegraph. He was 12 years old. 15 years later "Top Gun" made him a global superstar — yet he hated the film and clashed with Tom Cruise. The star of "The Saint," a devout Christian scientist, has made anything but a pious impression. "Batman Forever" director Joel Schumacher told Premiere Magazine that Kilmer was "the most psychologically disturbed human being I have ever worked with." Rumors flew that he once nearly torched a crew member with a cigarette. His outbursts became so notorious insiders dubbed him "psycho Kilmer."

Frenemy Tom Cruise even agreed to reunite with the "Iceman" for a "Top Gun" sequel. Maybe that's because the "psycho" in question is also one of the biggest talents of his generation. Or maybe it was fear of soon losing this difficult man. 

A star who once had Cher on his arm and every studio at his call, spent his final days living a lonely life. His leading man looks were degraded by pain — his once-booming actor's voice crushed into a pinched, mournful growl until his untimely death at 65 in the spring of 2025. This is the tragic story of Val Kilmer.

"There's nothing good about divorce," Val Kilmer told The Telegraph of his own failed marriage. But the iconic film star also comes from a broken home himself. Kilmer grew up affluent in Los Angeles, the son of an aerospace equipment distributor and real estate developer. But when he was nine, his parents' marriage crumbled, and he went to live with his father Eugene, his older brother Mark, and his younger brother Wesley.

Kilmer says the breakup of his family and home took a toll on him emotionally and strained his relationship with his father. "I was quiet," he says. "More contemplative than outgoing ... Things didn't go well between me and my father for a very long time." 

It's not clear that Kilmer ever patched up his relationship with the family patriarch. When Eugene died in 1995, Kilmer had a falling out with his older brother Mark as they battled over their father's estate. "Val has no example in his life of a good relationship he can look to," Mark told People in 1996. 

That attitude was perhaps sealed for Kilmer, in another tragedy, eight years later.

Val Kilmer's acting journey began with the most auspicious happening of his life. At 16, Kilmer was accepted into the legendary Juilliard School of acting in New York. The academy's alumni are legendary, including Robin Williams, Kelsey Grammer, Miles Davis, Christopher Reeve, and many others. But just before his enrollment began, Kilmer's life changed forever.

Kilmer's baby brother Wesley was an aspiring director. He was one year Val's junior and a diagnosed epileptic. Kilmer worshipped Wesley. He told The Telegraph in 2004 that his baby brother was a "genius," and explained how he "was just an amazing artist. I was sort of in awe of him." In Val's eyes, his artistically gifted brother was destined to be "another Steven Spielberg or George Lucas," as he told The New York Times. 

On the eve of Val's departure, Wesley suffered an epileptic fit — a kind of electrical storm of the brain that seizes the body and can render the sufferer unconscious. Wesley fell into the family's swimming pool and drowned. ”I didn't really get back to earth until about two or three years after my brother died," Kilmer told The Times, dropping an oddly unironic musical reference. "It's like that Nickelback song, 'I'm sick of sight without the sense of feeling.”' In 2019, a still reckoning Kilmer posted the above photo, captioned, "Me and my perfect brothers Mark And Wesley."

In what would become a pattern for Val Kilmer, his success was marred by some internal misery. He hated Juilliard, according to The New York Times. He rubbed his mentors and colleagues the wrong way. He disdained the "authoritarian" vibe of the famous school. He hated formalism. The silly "vocal exercises." The rules.

Nonetheless, he flourished. He landed lead parts onstage in "Orestes" and "The Wood Demon." He even wrote his own play with classmates they called "How It All Began." And it was. Famed theatre producer Joseph Papp caught the play while visiting the school and liked it. It ran for a month at The Public Theater in New York.

Kilmer was good enough for Broadway, landing John Byrne's "Slab Boys." But he was demoted twice, first by a young Kevin Bacon and then Sean Penn. Next was "As You Like It" in Minneapolis with Grammy and Tony award-winner Patti LuPone. In the wake of the worst personal loss of his life, sullen as he was, Kilmer found his calling. But the bitterness in success would not relent.

In 1984, Val Kilmer booked his first film, the goofy spoof "Top Secret!" Next was 1985's "Real Genius," another broad, dopey sci-fi romp. Yet somehow, Kilmer was still feeling picky. He wasn't impressed when he got the script for "Top Gun," according to his memoir, "I'm Your Huckleberry." "I didn't want the part. I didn't care about the film. The story didn't interest me," he writes.

Fortunately, the film's iconic director Tony Scott talked Kilmer into the project, promising him the role of the slick but cautious ace fighter pilot and foil to Tom Cruise's Maverick would be expanded. Scott's enthusiasm eventually won over the stubborn actor on the set, but Kilmer and Cruise still clashed. Each day when filming wrapped the two stars formed separate camps, mirroring their conflict in the film. "We were the party boys," Kilmer writes in his memoir (via the Daily Beast) of his boozy nights during production. Meanwhile, according to Kilmer, Cruise holed up late rehearsing lines, stunts, planning his world action-star takeover. 

"Top Gun" would go on to gross over $350 million and become a global cultural touchstone, none of which was in Kilmer's plans. As he recounted to The New York Times in 2020, "Fame wasn't my priority, and I had it." 

"I'm a character actor," Val Kilmer told The Telegraph in 2004, "but I look like a leading man." Those looks and that mindset made Kilmer the perfect choice to portray the tortured but beautiful Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's "The Doors" in 1991. The story is about the rocker's rise to rock stardom and his quick decline into drug abuse and then death at only 27.

Kilmer is brilliant as The Doors' troubled troubadour, but he began cementing his diva reputation on set, feuding with Stone about the direction of the film. Or as Stone politely put it, "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," the director told Esquire in 2005.

Kilmer's obsessiveness in his craft sometimes pushed co-stars too far. Actress Caitlin O'Heaney claims Kilmer assaulted her during an audition for "The Doors" that got out of control. "When I got to the room Val Kilmer picked me up and shaked me, throwing me down to the floor," she told Buzzfeed News in 2017. O'Heaney filed "a preliminary police report for battery" over the incident and was eventually paid a $24,500 settlement. She also revealed a confidentiality agreement "signed by her, Stone, and Kilmer," which barred "all parties" from "disclos[ing] it or the allegations to anyone else." However, the film's casting director Risa Bramon Garcia, who was present, refutes O'Heaney's story calling it, "blown out of proportion."

In 1993, Val Kilmer played Doc Holiday in "Tombstone." His stunning supporting role as the legendarily loquacious dentist turned gunslinger dying of tuberculosis stole the show. Kilmer's lines are so memorable he titled his memoir, "I'm Your Huckleberry," after a hard-boiled Holiday-ism from the climactic shootout. He followed that hit playing Robert Deniro's henchmen in "Heat," Michael Mann's masterpiece, arguably the best crime thriller of all time. Kilmer says nearly nothing as is riveting. 

But even character actors are tempted by the cowl. Kilmer claims he happened to spend the day in a bat cave when he got the call to replace Michael Keaton in "Batman Forever." The film is maybe the goofiest entry in the Batman canon — Jim Carrey is subtle, per usual, as The Riddler. It was a hit, but Kilmer was a nightmare. Director Joel Schumacher called him, "childish and impossible" according to Entertainment Weekly.

Kilmer made impossible demands. He was rude to co-stars. "On The Saint," he reportedly told the crew to avoid eye contact. After "The Island of Dr. Moreau" director John Frankenheimer declared, 'I will never climb Mount Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again." Upon wrap, Frankenheimer yelled, "Cut! Now get that bastard off my set!" per The Telegraph. Kilmer later wrote in his memoir (via The New York Times) that his on-set behavior was "an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each project," which ended up "alienat[ing] the head of every major studio."

While shooting the fantasy film "Willow," Val Kilmer and co-star Joanne Whalley fell in love. In 1988, the same year the movie was released, he and Whalley tied the knot. They welcomed two children, son Jack and daughter Mercedes, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1996 — just two months after the arrival of their second child. 

As Kilmer recalled in a 1999 interview with the Tampa Bay Times, he found out that Whalley had filed for divorce while he sat in a hotel room, watching CNN. "It was no fun," he said of what he described as the second most-expensive divorce ever to take place in New Mexico, where they resided. Of course, rumors of his infidelity had been rife — including a report that Whalley walked into his trailer during production of "Batman Forever" and found him half undressed and kissing another woman. 

After the dust settled, Whalley won full custody of their kids, and relocated to LA. "I miss my children every single way that's possible, and ways I didn't know were possible," he lamented. Over the years, Kilmer had reportedly fallen behind on child-support payments to Whalley.

By the mid-'90s, Val Kilmer's relationship with his wife Joanne Whalley began to crumble. The end was bitter. Kilmer's shooting schedule had kept them apart, and by 1996 they'd become so estranged, he told Elle, "I turned on CNN and found out my wife had filed for divorce. She took the kids and moved to a different state." Whalley claims the actor repeatedly fell behind on support payments.

Over the years, Kilmer has been 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. "Her name shocked me to the point that I spit out my spaghetti while exclaiming, 'No!," he writes in "I'm Your Huckleberry." Cher called the brief fling "too intense and hot," according to People. 

But the days of famous women on his arm are long gone. Kilmer says he hasn't dated anyone in the over 20 years since he split from his wife. "I've always found women infinitely more interesting than men," Kilmer writes in "I'm Your Huckleberry" (via People). He now lives largely alone on a small remaining portion of his once sprawling ranch. "I haven't had a girlfriend in 20 years," he mourns, adding, "The truth is I am lonely part of every day."

Val Kilmer used all that bittersweet Hollywood lucre 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. Kilmer dubbed the area around his ranch, "the homicide capital of the Southwest" and oddly claimed, "80% of the people in my county are drunk," he told Rolling Stone (via The Wall Street Journal). He also allegedly insulted Vietnam veterans in a 2005 interview with Esquire calling them, "borderline criminal or poor ... wretched kids."

Kilmer's neighbors demanded he apologize. An attempt was even made to block permits for the bed-and-breakfast on his property. The fracas grew so heated it attracted the attention of the New Mexico ACLU who offered to represent Kilmer.

Kilmer's ranch was his slice of heaven. "It's a wilderness sort of area," he says. "I have a river running through it. I keep a hundred animals," he told The Telegraph. It's where he proposed to his wife Joanne Whalley in 1988. But 20 years later, the 2008 financial collapse crushed him. Back taxes mounted, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican (via CBS News). He listed all but 14 acres of the property for $33 million in 2009 but sold to a Texas oil magnate in 2011 a little above half of his asking price. "I just lost my home like a million other people. It was pretty awful," he told The New York Times. 

Val Kilmer's life had been both charmed, and cursed, often by his own making. And that fits his view of reality, "God wants us to walk, but the devil sends a limo," he mused to The New York Times. But then, in 2014, Kilmer was sent something else entirely. He was touring a stage show and began having a hard time swallowing. Shortly thereafter he was staying in Cher's guest house when "Suddenly I awoke vomiting blood that covered the bed like a scene out of 'The Godfather,'" he writes in "I'm Your Huckleberry." In another similar incident recounted in the memoir, Kilmer describes how "blood dripped down my body, my vision blurred, my energy drained." 

The story gets fuzzy here because Kilmer rejects his diagnosis as a part of his devotion to Christian Science. Traditional doctors told him it was throat cancer. His spiritual advisor claimed he merely needed to pray the fear away.

Val Kilmer's cancer, however, seemed immune to such mind-over-matter intuitions. Kilmer's health was fast fading, and he was caught in a battle between his belief in God as a healer, and the desperate pleas from his son Jack and his daughter Mercedes to seek more earthly remedies. They pleaded with their stubborn father to save his own life.

Val Kilmer eventually bowed to the pressure of his children — neither of them Christian Scientists. "I just didn't want to experience their fear, which was profound," Kilmer told The New York Times, adding, "I would've had to go away, and I just didn't want to be without them."

That same year, 2014, Kilmer got surgery on his ailing instrument. Next was chemotherapy and radiation. He says doctors, "zapped my whole throat," which he still describes as, "dry as a bone." The surgery "left him with a tracheostomy tube," short of breath, and subsisting on a feeding tube. It reduced his once-booming baritone to "rasp," according to The Hollywood Reporter. His great gift was gone, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood has become an hourly struggle. The instrument over which I had complete mastery is now out of my control," he laments in "I'm Your Huckleberry."

During this time, he made no public announcement, preferring to keep the news private, between him and his family until ultimately going public with his cancer diagnosis in 2017. Then, a rough situation was made even worse when his daughter, Mercedes, was hit by a car and left with a long scar running down the length of one of her legs. Suddenly, both father and daughter were both under the care of doctors. "We were in the same hospital at the same time," she recalled when she, her father, and brother Jack were interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter. Jack recalled being devastated as he tended to both of them while hospitalized. "I was ... miserable, distraught, sitting next to these two," he said.

Val Kilmer wanted to keep his experience with cancer private. But in 2016 his "Ghost and The Darkness" co-star Michael Douglas was asked about his own well-documented cancer diagnosis. Douglas off-handedly mentioned his former co-star was suffering from the same disease.

Kilmer was not pleased and took to Facebook to deny the story, "I love Michael Douglas but he is misinformed," Kilmer wrote in 2016. He continued, "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."

By mid-2020 Kilmer appeared on "Good Morning America," his voice a cutting struggle, "I was diagnosed with throat cancer which healed very quickly," he admitted. But in classic Kilmer fashion, he made sure to preface that admission stoically. "I feel a lot better than I sound, but I feel wonderful," the actor gutted out.

Val Kilmer's health woes first became public in January 2015, when it was reported that he'd been rushed to a LA-area hospital after he began bleeding from this throat. An update claimed that doctors were running tests to detect the possible presence of a tumor, while the initial report claimed that members of Kilmer's family believed that he'd ignored the problem until it grew bad enough to require hospitalization. 

While Kilmer later confirmed he'd been diagnosed with throat cancer, his religious beliefs (Kilmer is a lifelong Christian Scientist) led him to first seek treatment from a Christian Scientist "practitioner," under the belief that Kilmer's cancer was actually his body's outward manifestation of inner fear. "I prayed, and that was my form of treatment," he explained in the 2020 interview with The New York Times. According to Kilmer, his belief system presented a complicated interpretation of his diagnosis — he didn't actually have cancer but was responding to "the suggestion of cancer." As he detailed, "the idea is rather than say I have it or possess it, there is a claim, there's a suggestion that this is a fact."

Kilmer shared more about his beliefs in a Reddit AMA. "People that know I am a Christian Scientist make the assumption that I have somehow endangered myself," he wrote, addressing speculation that he may have experienced a better outcome had he began chemo and radiation sooner. "But many many people have been healed by prayer throughout recorded history."

Eventually, Val Kilmer submitted to receive traditional cancer treatment; in his case, that involved chemotherapy and radiation on his throat. After that treatment, Kilmer required a tracheostomy tube in order to breathe. 

However, he remained adamant that it was the treatment, not the cancer, that was responsible for his trach tube. "That's from radiation and chemotherapy. It's not from cancer," he told the outlet. The way Kilmer viewed it, it was prayer that alleviated his illness, while the medical treatment he underwent was what damaged him. "That 'treatment' caused my suffering," he explained.

In 2021, Kilmer revealed that he was cancer-free. The trach tube, however, had damaged his speaking voice. "I can't speak without plugging this hole [in his throat]. You have to make the choice to breathe or to eat," he said in the documentary about him, "Val" (reported People), noting that he now required a feeding tube in order to ingest food.

Losing his voice due to his tracheostomy tube robbed Val Kilmer of his ability to act, at least in the manner in which he had before. It reduced his once-booming baritone to a "rasp," according to The Hollywood Reporter. His great gift was gone, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood has become an hourly struggle. The instrument over which I had complete mastery is now out of my control," he lamented in "I'm Your Huckleberry." When telling his story in the 2021 documentary "Val," Kilmer was unable to provide the narration; instead, his son, Jack, spoke for him throughout the film.

No longer able to book acting roles, Kilmer was forced to find other ways to generate revenue. One of these involved meet-and-greets at fan conventions, signing autographs for a fee. "I don't look great and I'm basically selling my old self, my old career," Kilmer (voiced by his son) said in the film, as reported by the New York Post. "For many people it's like the lowest thing you can do — talk about your old pictures and sell photographs of when you were 'Batman' or the 'Terminator.'" 

Kilmer, however, optimistically saw a silver lining in his new reality. "But it enables me to meet my fans and what ends up happening is I feel really grateful rather than humiliated because there's so many people," he observed.

While Val Kilmer declared that he'd beaten cancer in 2021, the treatment he'd undergone to become cancer-free took a toll. After the promotional blitz for his documentary, "Val," Kilmer retreated from the spotlight. The last time he'd been photographed in public, in fact, was when he attended a 2019 event with his daughter, Mercedes. 

Several outlets claimed the reason for that was that his body had become so weakened that he'd grown increasingly frail. In fact, it's believed that Kilmer was so weakened that he'd been confined to bed for the last few years of his life. That was reportedly because the radiation and chemotherapy he'd undergone had sucked all his energy, to the point he was no longer able to pull himself out of bed.

Kilmer's fans, however, had no idea how badly he'd deteriorated. In February 2025, he posted a video via Instagram, in which the healthy-looking Kilmer placed a Batman mask over his face. That video, reported TMZ, was taken years earlier, and didn't accurately reflect the actual state of his health. 

On April 1, 2025, Val Kilmer's family announced that he'd died at the age of 65. According to the actor's obituary in The New York Times, his daughter, Mercedes, attributed the cause his death to pneumonia. 

In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kilmer opened up about how his experience with cancer had left him fundamentally changed. "I was too serious," he said of the focus he'd placed on his Hollywood career. "I'd get upset when things like Oscars and recognition failed to come my way." That recognition, he'd come to recognize, was reflective of the affection that the industry holds for an actor. "I would like to have more Oscars than anybody," he observed. "Meryl Streep must feel pretty good, you know? It must feel nice to know that everyone loves her. It's about being loved."

In the end, he was — perhaps more than he realized. Upon news of his death, tributes from peers flooded social media. "I'm remembering Val Kilmer today with great admiration for him as a man and as a generational talent who left us an enviable legacy of indelible acting performances," his "Batman Forever" co-star Jim Carrey said in a statement, via USA Today. "His greatest artistic achievements were rivaled only by the grace and courage with which he endured his life's most challenging moments." Also honoring Kilmer was Josh Brolin, who wrote on Instagram, "See ya, pal. I'm going to miss you. You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker."