By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-04-02 04:46:42 | Updated at 2025-04-03 06:16:13
1 day ago
Val Kilmer, the California-born, Juilliard-trained actor who starred in films including Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone and Batman Forever and earned a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy, has died, The New York Times reported. He was 65.
The cause of death was pneumonia, the paper said, citing his daughter Mercedes Kilmer. In 2014, Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer but later recovered.
Kilmer was one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men in the 1990s before numerous spats with directors and co-stars and a series of flops dented his career. Over the years, Kilmer gained a reputation as temperamental, intense, perfectionistic and sometimes egotistical.
“When certain people criticise me for being demanding, I think that’s a cover for something they didn’t do well. I think they’re trying to protect themselves,” Kilmer told the Orange County Register newspaper in 2003.
“I believe I’m challenging, not demanding, and I make no apologies for that.”
