Val Kilmer, the versatile actor best known for his enduring roles in Top Gun (1986), The Doors (1991), and Batman Forever (1995), has died at age 65.

His daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, confirmed to the New York Times that the cause of death was pneumonia. Kilmer had battled throat cancer since 2014 and underwent two tracheostomies, before reportedly recovering in 2021.

Despite losing his natural speaking voice, Kilmer found creative outlets beyond the screen. He wrote, made music, photographed, and painted. His visual art practice, in fact, blossomed in recent years, as he staged shows of his Pop-inflected works and sold pieces directly to fans online.

“With little voice, my creative juices were boiling over and pouring out of me,” he wrote around 2022. “I started creating again, painting, writing anything I could. I felt the art healing me.”

 

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At first glance, Kilmer’s paintings appear to be self-portraits. They depict him in the various roles that made him famous, among them Doc Holliday, the rowdy gunslinger he played in Tombstone (1993); Jim Morrison, the charismatic frontman of the Doors; Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, the cocky naval aviator in Top Gun; and of course, Batman. Created on steel with stencils and spray paints, the pieces were sometimes interposed with text: “LOVE” or “GOD,” say, or a quote from one of his films.

But this body of work appears to be as much a form of iconography. Through repetition, Kilmer seemed to be tackling matters far larger than himself: celebrity and identity.

“By repainting the exact same thing using a stencil,” he told Men’s Health in 2020, “it was a way of contemplating the subject while being very strict with what I was inviting myself to do.”

One of Val Kilmer’s Batman paintings. Photo: @valkilmer on X.

Born in 1959 in Los Angeles, California, Kilmer came to the performing arts by way of theater after graduating from Juilliard School as one of its youngest students. He first appeared on the big screen in the 1986 spoof Top Secret!, in which he played the raffish rockstar Nick Rivers. His star rose with Top Gun, establishing his brooding onscreen presence and leading to his series of high-profile roles throughout the 1990s.

Kilmer remained a bankable actor in the aughts, when he starred in hits including Alexander (2004), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), and Déjà Vu (2006). He also sought out auteur-driven projects, working with Francis Ford Coppola for Twixt (2011) and Harmony Korine for The Fourth Dimension (2012). In 2022, he reprised his role as Iceman for the Top Gun sequel—his final onscreen appearance.

Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986). Photo: Paramount Pictures / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images.

Throughout, Kilmer maintained an ambivalence toward his fame. “I just wasn’t interested in my career that way, or my persona. My acting was really my only priority,” he told Vanity Fair in 2012. “I just don’t think I’ve ever been comfortable at public functions and selling myself as an entity.”

Just as he turned toward more personal work in his latter-day career (such as his one-man play Citizen Twain, about American author Mark Twain), so his visual art has come to the fore in the past decade.

Around 2017, he commenced sharing and selling his artworks on social media—some of them his stenciled self-portraits, others abstractions created with acrylic resin. He opened his first New York show, “VALLHOLLA,” at Woodward Gallery that same year, presenting his Doc Holliday canvases and abstract works featuring fish, and hosted the pop-up exhibition, “Icon Go On, I’ll Go On,” at Gabba Gallery in L.A.

 

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(Kilmer has also been in legal trouble for a tumbleweed sculpture he created in 2016. According to Texas-based artist Bale Creek Allen, he had been creating such works for years before the actor stole the design. Kilmer’s sculpture, covered in 22 karat gold, reportedly sold for $150,000. Allen sued in 2019 and the case was later confidentially settled.)

In 2018, Kilmer founded HELMEL Studios in L.A. to house his production company and art gallery. It was also open to local artists looking for a place to work or to be mentored. Kilmer, in 2020, called it a “fun, sacred space where eclectic artists gather to collaborate and through new technology inspire giving and spark change in our local community.”

“I wanted a place where actors and artists could play,” he added. “I couldn’t get in a gallery so I made my own.”

From Val Kilmer’s God Panel NFT Collection. Photo: valkilmer.com

Kilmer also found a playground on the blockchain. Besides selling NFTs of his “God” series in 2022, in collaboration with the Galaxis platform, the actor unveiled Kamp Kilmer, a virtual initiative intended to encourage collaborative work among artists. It has platformed multiple creatives who have variously remixed Kilmer’s art and artifacts—from animating his Juilliard audition tape to playing off his “God” panels. Kilmer’s engagement with other NFT projects, particularly Goblintown, was also all over his Twitter feed.

At the same time, Kilmer continued to exhibit: his steel plate works were given an outing at PRJCTLA in 2022, while his stenciled pieces were included in the Los Angeles Art Show as part of Fabrik Projects’ booth. Last year also saw Woodward Gallery present the exhibition “Spirit World Biology,” which placed the actor’s metal artworks in dialogue with late artist Hiro Ichikawa’s delicate, nature-inspired paintings.

Works by Val Kilmer on view at the 2023 Los Angeles Art Show. Photo: © Brian Cahn / ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News.

As recently as last month, Kilmer was offering his works for sale on his website—pieces that reveal his growing inclination toward abstraction. A Doc Holliday stenciled work comes newly dotted with paint spatters; two “LOVE” canvases are backgrounded by colorful craquelure. One abstract print was deemed a “loud, untamed” power chord. Another, lightly dusted with blue and stained with black ink, was likened to “a low burn, like when the campfire cools down but you’re still wide awake.”

“There’s a unique joy in transforming raw materials and imagination into something tangible,” Kilmer wrote in a 2024 post. “The process is rewarding in and of itself, but at the end, I do love having an object in my hand that I made—that I grew from gathered materials, practice, and my own imagination.”