Val Kilmer Biography

Biography - Contact Information

Val Kilmer Biography
From CURRENT BIOGRAPHY January 1996
Dec. 31, 1959- Actor; documentary filmmaker; playwright; screenwriter. Address: c/o Creative Artists Agency, 9803 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212
The actor Val Kilmer, best known for his performances as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) and, most recently, the latest celluloid incarnation of comic-book hero Batman, has contended that he is uncomfortable in the role of movie star. "Every year I debate how I can tell stories- which is how I look at movie acting- in a way that’s less taxing for me personally," Kilmer told Mim Udovitch for Harper’s Bazaar (June 1996). "Because I’m not good at this stuff, or taking pictures, or selling movies, or being in them. And being recognized for them is excruciatingly painful- to the point that I’ve done very little work because of it." Kilmer is known for his extensive role preparation, his wide-ranging interests, and his sincerity. Joel Schumacher, who directed him in Batman Forever (1995), told Udovitch, "I’ve never talked to Val about any anything, even just his observations about mutual friends, where he doesn't have some kind of abstract angle."
A distant cousin of the poet Joyce Kilmer, Val Kilmer was born on December 31,1959 in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, California, the second of the three sons of Eugene Kilmer, who owned an aerodynamics-distribution company and later became a real-estate developer, and his wife, Gladys, a homemaker. When Kilmer was nine years old, his parents divorced, and his mother moved to Arizona, where she became a hostess at a guest ranch that the family owned. Kilmer stayed behind in the then-rural (now suburban) town of Chatsworth, California with his father, whom he described in an interview with the novelist Bret Easton Ellis for Details (June 1995) as having been "very eccentric, extreme in his personality, elusive, powerful but shy."
Kilmer's much-remarked intensity and sincerity was evident at an early age. He failed his first audition for a television commercial, when he was 12, because he told the director that he could not pretend to like the hamburgers he was supposed to praise. At Chatsworth High School, Kilmer was not a good student, as he admitted to Ellis: "I had trouble with tests. I'm spiritually dyslexic: If I'm interested in something I can remember it forever; if not, I have to find a trick." He has credited his younbger brother, Wesley, with having inspired him creatively. In an interview with Richard Natale of Cosmopolitan (June 1992), he described Wesley as "a genius, with no blocks about anything."
Wesley Kilmer drowned in 1977. on the day before Val left Chatsworth for New York City, where he became, at the age of 17, one of the youngest students ever admitted to the drama department of the Juilliard School. "It was a place to make sense of my brother's death, to apply it to my life," Kilmer told Ellis. "That is the only value those of us living can take out of someone passing… The understanding he gave me about art and life was… a gift." In his interview with Natale, Kilmer recalled the "immediate challenge" of Juilliard's grueling eighteen-hour days. "It took a lot of work." he said, "but some good came out of it: I learned that those qualities I had of my brother's were not lost. I was able to find them and respect them." At Juilliard, Kilmer studied classical theatre "simply because it was the hardest thing to do," as he recalled to Ellis. In 1981 he performed in two productions for the New York Shakespeare Festival: How It All Began, a new play he had cowritten, and Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, in which he played the servant to Hotspur. In 1982 he portrayed Orlando in As You Like It, in Minneapolis. Among the other plays in which he appeared was Richard III. In 1983 he made his off-Broadway debut in John Byrne's The Slab Boys, in which he played opposite Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.
In an interview with Joseph C. Koenenn for New York Newsday (May 28, I986), Kilmer said he preferred acting on stage to acting in movies, even though he had by then made three feature films. "There are not many film actors my age that have a firm foundation in theatre," he observed. "It's a disturbing thought." In 1988 he played the title role in Hamlet for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder and in a 1992 production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, a Jacobean tragedy about brothersister incest, he played "a magnificently hiss-worthy villain," according to Natale. Kilmer reaffirmed his love for working in the theatre in the interview with Mim Udovitch: "In general onstage, something is created that's a uniquely human creation, and the audience is a major participant in the thing that's created, one way or the other. That's what the evening is about, and it's life. And I've had moments like that, which are much more personal than with movies, because on film all moments can be manipulated."
Kilmer had made his feature-film debut as the Elvis-style rock star Nick Rivers in Top Secret! (1984), a parody of espionage movies. The film was written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, the team responsible for the successful spoof Airplane!, to which Top Secret! was inevitably, and usually unfavorably, compared. It was during the making of that movie that Kilmer earned his reputation for being a demanding actor. "We would all butt heads when we couldn't define a motivation for his character," Abrahams recalled to Rebecca Ascher-Walsh for Entertainment Weekly (June 30-July 7,1995). "He wanted to know who Nick Rivers was and why he would say things, and in the context of a parody, you think, "Is it really so important?"' In an indication of the lengths to which he would go to get a good part, Kilmer prepared for his audition for the role by donning an Elvis outfit, styling his hair like James Dean, and affecting the young Marlon Brando's voice. After he won the part, he further developed his character by watching footage of the 1950s singers Geno Vincent and Paul Anka.
Set in East Germany, in what appears to be the 1950s, notwithstanding references to more recent American presidents, such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Top Secret! revolves around Nick Rivers’s visit to a German cultural festival, which is intended to divert the diplomatic community from a plot to unify Germany. Remaining oblivious to the improbable goings-on around him, Rivers becomes involved with a woman whose scientist father is being held captive by the coup plotters. Most critics found the movie amiable and pleasant, but not the laugh riot that Airplane! was. "Val Kilmer is extremely funny," Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times (June 22,1984), and Gary Arnold of the Washington Post (June 26, 1984) declared that Kilmer "becomes delightfully animated when performing" the musical segments. Kilmer later released an EP under the name of Nick Rivers.
In the following year, Kilmer made his first foray into television, as Eric in the ABC special One Too Many, a story about teenage alcoholism. "I got all kinds of letters from kids, powerful stuff." he told Koennen. "It made me feel good about what I do." Among the other made-for-television movies in which he appeared were The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1986), The Man Who Broke l,000 Chains (1987), and Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid (1989). Perhaps the paucity of Kilmer's television work is a reflection of his attitude toward the medium. "Television reduces the standards of the culture to the standards of television," he told Ellis. "There's a basic intrigue, a frivolousness about what people think they should know about other people."
Kilmer's next film role was that of the prankish student physicist Chris Knight in Martha Coolidge's Real Genius (1985), in which Knight and his roommate, both of whom are students at an academy for the gifted, foil the plot of a professor who is trying to use them to develop a deadly Iaser weapon for the CIA. To get the part of the obnoxious youth, Kilmer had greeted the producer, Brian Grazer with "I'm sorry. You look like you're twelve years old. I like to work with men," as he recalled to Ascher-Walsh. The movie elicited widely, varying reviews, as did Kilmer's performance. At the negative end of the spectrum, Kathleen Carroll wrote in the New York Daily News (August 7,1985) that Knight was "played with such raving intensity by Val Kilmer that you want to throw a book at this blond Hollywood hopeful, preferably a book about acting." But Lawrence O'Toole predicted in Maclean's (August 26,1985), "It is likely that the sexy, suave Kilmer will become a major star."
Fortunately for Kilmer's career, his next film role as that of fighter pilot Tom "Iceman" Kasanzky in Tony Scott's slick box-office smash Top Gun (1986), which starred Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. Widely criticized for its didacticism, jingoistic ethos of patriotism, and celebration of the gung-ho warrior lifestyle, Top Gun was also admired by many for its stunning aerial cinematography. Paul Attanasio wrote in the Washington Post (May 19, 1986) that Kilmer was "surprisingly effective as the dour Iceman." "My character, Iceman, is the best young fighter pilot in the navy… " Kilmer told Koennen. "[While filming Top Gun] I met a few of 'em like Iceman-God bless 'em. We need a strong defense. I believe that if every hawk died one night, some of the doves would wake up and find their beaks had grown." Sometime in between making Real Genius and Top Gun, Kilmer had begun directing the antinuclear documentary Journey to Victory, which he described to Koennen as being about "an ability to communicate equal to what we have created technically, one that's in harmony with what we've got going technically." He reportedly turned down a number of offers in order to complete the documentary. Although Kilmer's next film, Ron Howard's fantasy-adventure Willow (1988), in which he played the warrior Madmartigan, performed poorly at the box office it provided the actor with the opportunity to meet his future wife, the British actress Joanne Whalley, who also appeared in the film. "We actually met before we met," Kilmer explained to Natale. "When I was filming Top Secret! in London, I used to second-act this play called The Genius. I was taken by this young actress who played a physicist. I used to wait for her outside in the rain and follow her to a bar where she'd go for a drink. But I never had the nerve to go up and talk to her." When he met her again on the set of Willow, his interest was aroused as if for the first time-he did not find out until much later that it had been Whalley whom he had been trying to approach some four years earlier. After marrying in March 1988, the couple costarred in John Dahl's directorial debut, Kill Me Again [1989), a film noir set in the Nevada desert. Leonard Maltin wrote in his Movie and Video Guide (1994) that "fans of the detective genre will enjoy this mild send-up of crime flicks, [which is] fun but also inherently derivative."
In 1989 Kilmer auditioned for the role of the self-destructive rock star Jim Morrison, the legendary lead singer and lyricist of the Doors, in Oliver Stone's proposed film biography by sending the director an unsolicited video of himself singing Doors songs that had been recorded at different stages of Morrison's brief career. (The singer died in Paris in 1971, at the age of 27, of apparent heart failure widely believed to have been brought on by drug and alcohol abuse.) Upon seeing Kilmer's video and hearing his baritone voice, Stone was hooked, as he told Paul Chutkow of the New York Times (February 24,1991): "I read a lot of other actors, but it was really clear that Val understood Jim. Val had played Hamlet, and he found a lot of similarities to Hamlet in Jim's life: the concept being a prince, resisting a leadership role, and coming to the conclusion that there was something wrong in the kingdom." Once he had been given the role, Kilmer prepared for it by reading a biography about Morrison, attending concerts by Doors tribute bands, listening to the Doors' music, and wearing Morrison's trademark leather pants and reading his poetry.
Kilmer learned 50 Doors songs,15 of which he actually performed on-screen. All the live musical numbers in the film were done by Kilmer except for five lines, including a scream. The background vocals were Morrison's. Kilmer's and Morrison's voices were seamlessly blended to the point where even the Doors' guitarist, Robby Krieger, and drummer, John Densmore, guessed wrong 80 percent of the time when trying to distinguish between the two. (The Doors' keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, refused to cooperate with the making of the film. "It hurts to disappoint someone who knows the truth…" Kilmer told Jeffrey Ressner of Rolling Stone [April 4.1991]. "[But] the people I was directly involved with convinced me I was on the right track, and what else can you ask for as an actor?") Kilmer's physical resemblance to Morrison was no less striking, once he had styled his hair and inserted the black contact lenses that gave his eyes a permanently dilated appearance. "It was like having [Morrison] back for a while," Krieger told Ressner. "Spooky."
"Uncanny" was the word most frequently used to describe Kilmer's performance in Stone's hagiographic The Doors (1991). Although many reviewers were critical of what they saw as Stone's worshipful credulity, his lack of a sense of irony or humor, and the film's unintended campiness, most of the unfavorable reviews were written by those who had expressed displeasure with Morrison himself. But even Hal Hinson, who panned the movie in the Washington Post (March 1,1991), conceded that "Kilmer does a noteworthy impersonation of the singer, especially onstage, where he gets Morrison's self-absorption." Stuart Klawans of the Notion (March 25,1991) agreed, writing that "as Jim, Val Kilmer delivers a rare kind of performance. He looks and sounds very much like Morrison, and yet he doesn't seem to be doing an impersonation." In the New York Times (March 1, 1991), Janet Maslin declared that Kilmer's performance "is so right it goes well beyond the uncanny. Leading dauntingly with his chin, projecting sexy insolence, never losing
sight of the singer's magnetism, Mr. Kilmer captures all of Morrison's reckless, insinuating appeal… Musically, too,
Mr. Kilmer is unerringly good."
Not a trace of his previous rock-'n'-roll personas was evident in Kilmer's next cinematic role. In the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Michael Apted's Thunderheart (1992), Kilmer, who is part Cherokee, portrayed a part-Sioux FBI agent assigned to investigate a murder on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s. Inspired by real events surrounding the occupation of Wounded Knee in 19i3 by members of the American Indian Movement, the film ranks as one of Kilmer's best. "He has a colossal amount of concentration," Apted told Natale. "The public and the critics sometimes miss it because his performances are not showy, they're organic and fundamental." Reviewing Thunderheart in the Village Voice (April 7, 1992), Manohla Dargis wrote, "Kilmer doesn’t dominate the role: he lets it gradually emerge with self-awareness and passion." Roger Ebert was struck by how little Kilmer's FBI agent resembled his previous role and by how thoroughly the actor seemed to inhabit the character. "He is so inside the one
that you cannot get a glimpse of the other." Ebert wrote in a review that appeared in the New York Daily News (April 3, 1992). "If there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Kilmer should get it."
In 1993 Kilmer appeared in three films. Working once again with the director Tony Scott, he supplied the disembodied voice of Elvis Presley in True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino. Costarring with Kim Basinger in Russell Mulcahy's The Real McCoy, a movie Kilmer has referred to as "a dog," he played a bank robber. His most substantial role that year was that of the consumptive gunslinger Doc Holliday in George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp.
Most critics faulted Tombstone for being too long and uneven in tone, which they attributed to the firing of the movie's original director Kevin Jarre, one month into the production. Dave Kehr of the New York Daily News (December 24,1993) declared Kilmer's performance to be "by far the film's most entertaining element," and John Anderson of New York Newsday (December 24. 1993) wrote that his character was "the electric engine of the movie." Many film reviewers speculated that if Disney Studios, which feared bad publicity over Jarre's termination, had shown advance screenings of the film, Kilmer might have won an Oscar. One Academy voter told Allen Barra of the Village Voice (March 29,1994), "If I'd seen Tombstone before I voted, I'd have voted for Kilmer. And I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. The public was ahead of the critics, the Academy, and even Kilmer's own studio on this one."
One film figure who did see Tombstone was Joel Schumacher, the director of Batman Forever, the third Batman movie produced in recent years. Schumacher noticed Kilmer's "dark edge" and good looks in Tombstone and thought he would be perfect to replace Michael Keaton, who had rejected a third turn as the Caped Crusader. Batman Forever raked in a record $53 million at the box office its opening weekend. Kilmer had no illusions about starring in Batman Forever. "It is what it is. it's done. It's big," he said to Ascher-W'alsh, adding, "I've done an absurdly commercial cartoon, and now I'm more likely to get hired for a job I couldn't get hired for before."
In 1995 Kilmer played one of the first airmail pilots to navigate the Andes Mountains in Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wings of Courage, the first narrative film to use IMAX's three-dimensional process. In the autumn of that year, he portrayed Chris Shiherlis, a safecracker, in Michael Mann's Heat, starring Robert De Niro and AI Pacino. Kilmer has at least three projects in the works: a remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, costarring Marlon Brando, The Ghost and the Darkness, about an engineer in turn-of-the-century East Africa, and The Killer Inside Me, his own adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jim Thompson, in which he will star as a small-town deputy sheriff who is also a serial killer. He explained his interest in the latter role to Bret Easton Ellis: "Without understanding, we cannot heal this disease of ultraviolence… I don't feel the need for another extremely violent film to be made. But I want to confront my own fears about violent impulses." Kilmer is the author of a collection of poetry, My Eden After Burns, which contains "The Pfeiffer Howls at the Moon," a testament to his past romance with the actress Michelle Pfeiffer.
"Val Kilmer is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most gracious actor it has ever been my pleasure to meet."Mim Udovitch wrote. "He is modest, he is well-spoken, he is generous." The six-foot-tall, 155 pound actor lives in a rustic adobe cabin on a 30 acre ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico when he is not working in Los Angeles or on location. He owns three buffalo, Bambi, Jezebel, and James (after the soul singer James Brown, for the way the animal dances). He and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer have a daughter, Mercedes, born in 1991, and a son, Jack, born in 1995. "I don't know of anything a man could create that compares to creating a healthy human being," Kilmer told Natale. "Not a bridge, not a big bank account, a fast car, or any of those male things, even artistic things." Joanne Whalley-Kilmer filed for divorce in July 1995. Kilmer enjoys the music of Chet Baker, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel. T. Rex, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie, among others; the art of Picasso, Rembrandt and Van Gogh; and the humor of the controversial radio talk-show host Howard Stern.
Selected Biographical References: Cosmopolitan p78 + Je ’92 pors; Details p110+ je ’95 pors; Harper’s Bazaar p140+ Je ’95 pors; Rolling Stone p38+Ap 4 ’91 pors; Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television vol 7 (1989); Who’s Who in America, 1995

Val Kilmer Contact Information
The following three American mailing addresses have all been claimed to be Val Kilmer's mailing addresses. Val Kilmer has no known public e-mail address. I am not associated with him in any way, so please do not send me any fan mail to Val Kilmer. I must warn you, though, that I have never heard of anyone receiving any replies from any of these addresses. Good luck if you do decide to send him some fan mail.
Val Kilmer
1435 Linda Crest Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Val Kilmer
c/o Creative Artists Agency
9830 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
Val Kilmer
P.O. Box 360
Tesuque, NM 87574 - 0362