Remembering Val Kilmer: film star, artist, collector, and subverter of the male archetype – The Art Newspaper

Val Kilmer, the multi-talented actor and artist, poet and playwright, known for his roles in Top Gun (1986), The Doors (1991), Tombstone (1993), Heat (1995) and Batman Forever (1995), has died aged 65.

Beyond his cinematic achievements, Kilmer was a successful visual artist, an art collector and an art fair regular. Encountered at Art Basel in 2010, Kilmer told The Art Newspaper he was “seeing some friends and trying to learn new things”. Gallerists will remember him as an engaged member of the Los Angeles contemporary art community.

Kilmer was born in Los Angeles on the last day of 1959. He was “exposed to a very unusual vision of how ‘easy’ it is to make things that are beautiful,” he told The Guardian in a 2017 interview, from observing his younger brother, Wesley, “a legitimate genius… he was born with a paintbrush in his hand”. At just 17, Val Kilmer was admitted to the drama department at the Juilliard School, in New York City, and, in a four-decade acting career, went on to appear in more than 60 Hollywood films.

In recent years, he had faced significant health challenges, including suffering from throat cancer, which became publicly known around 2017 and left a lasting impact on his voice. In reprising his breakout Top Gun role as the fighter pilot Iceman in the sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Kilmer poignantly incorporated his illness into a performance—opposite Tom Cruise as Maverick—where his character has risen to be commander of the US Pacific fleet.

Kilmer’s journey into visual arts offered his fans more insight into the complexities of his character. His artistic portfolio was diverse, encompassing painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media. It often delved into his ancestry—his mother was of Swedish descent, his father had Cherokee, Irish and German roots— as well as themes from his acting career, with series dedicated to exploring the complexities of the characters he portrayed, including Morrison and Batman.

In 2012, Kilmer’s move into visual arts was officially marked with a Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from William Woods University, in Fulton, Missouri. In 2017, he made his New York City fine art debut with the exhibition Valholla at Woodward Gallery. The title, a play on “Valhalla”—the mythological “hall of slain warriors” in Norse mythology—referenced Kilmer’s Norse blood. Critics were impressed: the New York-based online magazine Observer highlighted Kilmer’s exploration of philosophical concepts of transition, while fellow American cultural publication W Magazine emphasised the spiritual undertones in his art, particularly his recurring use of the word “God” as a motif.

A collection that mirrored his eclectic tastes

He was also a notable art collector and had ambitious plans to open a sculpture park at his New Mexico ranch, near Santa Fe, reflecting his desire to create a space where his own works and other contemporary sculptures could coexist in a natural landscape. A highlight of his collection was Roxy Paine’s Maelstrom (2009), a striking stainless steel sculpture previously shown on the rooftop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. These sculpture park plans had been abandoned by 2012, in part because of Kilmer’s shifting artistic focus and the health challenges of his later years.

Also featured in his diverse collection of contemporary art—which mirrored his eclectic tastes—were works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Kilmer went on the record with his admiration of the rawness of Basquiat’s work and Warhol’s pointed explorations of pop culture and celebrity.

Beyond creating art, Kilmer invested in fostering artistic communities in his hometown. He established Los Angeles’s HelMel Studios & Gallery, a space dedicated to nurturing emerging artists and promoting collaborative projects with the city’s less gilded communities. His interest in contemporary art also extended to the digital realm with the creation of the virtual space Kamp Kilmer.

Kilmer was known for challenging traditional ideals of masculinity in his film roles, most notably in Top Gun and, perhaps most notably in Heat (1995). Directed by Michael Mann, Kilmer played the role of Chris Shiherlis, a skilled but troubled bank robber. The role demonstrated his talent for reinterpreting and pushing archetypal Hollywood roles towards a more complex realism. The film’s expressionist, highly stylised portrayal of the cops-and-robbers dynamic became a touchstone for its genre, with Kilmer’s performance standing out for its intensity and emotional depth.

In Tony Scott’s Top Gun, his breakthrough film, his portrayal of Iceman—with the character’s rivalry and charged interactions with Cruise’s Maverick—played into what the film-maker Quentin Tarantino described as “homoerotic tension”, subverting the traditional macho dynamics of Hollywood blockbuster action films. This nuanced approach to masculinity became one of the most discussed aspects of his performance. He played with this ability to subvert ideas of masculinity in later roles such as the gay private investigator he played in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), opposite Robert Downey Jr.

Critics were mystified that he was never nominated for an Academy Award, not even for his protean inhabiting of the rock icon Jim Morrison in The Doors, performing the songs live.

At the 2000 advance screening at Sony headquarters, in New York City, of Ed Harris’s Jackson Pollock biopic, Pollock—in which Kilmer played Willem de Kooning—The Art Newspaper’s diarist spotted the novelists Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis among a world-weary Manhattan crowd. “However, a hush fell over even this blasé audience,” the diarist reported, “when they slowly realised that sitting among them was America’s most famous living artist, here to watch the biopic of America’s most famous dead one. Yes, slap there in centre-row sat none other than JJ, no, not Jay Jopling but Jasper Johns lui-même…. [who] was even heard to chuckle at Val Kilmer as De Kooning and seemed rightly entertained by the whole event.”

That fleeting connection with Johns captures Kilmer’s ability to catch the eye and the heart—a natural entertainer bridging the worlds of art and film—and to reach out directly to his audience, through the screen.

Val Edward Kilmer, born Los Angeles 31 December 1959; married 1988 Joanne Whalley (one daughter, one son; marriage dissolved 1996); died Los Angeles 1 April 2025.