Hollywood actor Val Kilmer passed away on April 1 after almost a decade of battling throat cancer. Kilmer played many roles in his time as an actor and had a strong personality that helped make his career successful.
“I think that he was one of those actors who kind of had everything in the sense that he was a movie star but he also had incredible range. He could disappear in a role like the greats tend to.” – Christopher Sailor, University of North Georgia film professor
Over the span of Kilmer’s career, he became a prominent figure in Hollywood who was known for his ability to play multiple roles and fully embody each character with passion and dedication across a variety of genres.
Kilmer was born on Dec. 31, 1959, and began studying acting in grammar school, where Kilmer dreamed of being like Marlon Brando, an actor who was famously known for his films in the 1970s. There, Kilmer found his love for the art and continued to follow his passion. He was later recognized as one of the youngest students accepted to The Juilliard School.
As Kilmer’s career began to flourish, he eventually co-starred in the 1996 film “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” with Brando. Although he admired Brando, this film was rumored to be a “disastrous production.”
A turning point in his career came in 1986 with his role of Tom Kazansky in “Top Gun.”
Christopher Sailor, a film professor at UNG, said, “There are three things I associate him with the most, and that is ‘Top Gun,’ ‘Tombstone’ and ‘Batman.'”
Although Kilmer was best known for these popular roles, he acted in more than 75 films during his career, with most gaining a big audience and being known as “classics.”
“I think he will be most remembered by his role in ‘Tombstone,'” Sailor said. “He did so good playing the role of Doc Holiday. He has all the best lines, and the film is just a classic.”
Kilmer had a versatility that pushed him to be great in any film production. His intensity in films often made people say they met the character and not the actor because Kilmer would deep dive into a role and truly be the character he was playing.
Sailor said, “There’s that thing that sometimes people just have it, and you know it when you see it, and Kilmer had that. This combination of magnetism and dedication to the craft and his willingness and seemingly hunger to work with great directors and actors he admired.”
Val Kilmer touched many generations with his work, leaving all ages of people to have some form of a Kilmer movie on their watched list. In Kilmer’s final film, “Top Gun Maverick,” where he fully performed in silence due to his crucial condition, he got to play one more character for the last time in what is known as one of the film industry’s most global attainments worldwide.
