Val Kilmer's ‘Billy'

Billy himself would have approved.

- Henry C. Parke

Val as Doc in Tombstone 1993
True West Archives

The late Val Kilmer's acting career delved into films of so many genres—from Top Secret to Top Gun, from The Doors to The Island of Dr. Moreau—that it's hard to pick favorites. Unless you love Westerns, in which case your favorite is undoubtedly his portrayal of Doc Holliday in Tombstone. He'd go on to several more in the genre, including Thunderheart, The Missing, Comanche Moon, but his first Western, and his first dramatic film as a leading man, is often overlooked.

In 1989 Val Kilmer was the title character in the TNT film Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid. It was Vidal's third go at the story. His 1955 teleplay for Philco Television Playhouse, The Death of Billy the Kid, featured Paul Newman, on the verge of stardom, as Billy. Newman saw the value of the property, and promoted it as a feature. It became one in 1958, as The Left-Handed Gun, adapted by Leslie Stevens, directed by Arthur Penn, starring Newman, with radio's Paladin, John Dehner, as Pat Garrett.

In 1989, now with Kilmer on the verge of stardom, Vidal took his third pass. Duncan Regehr, who has always divided his time between acting and graphic art, had made a splash as Errol Flynn in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, and would soon become TV's Zorro. He remembers going in to read for Pat Garrett. “They called up and said, ‘We'd like to match you up with a young actor named Val Kilmer.’ So Val and I sat down and read a bunch of scenes together. There was a good thing going between the two of us, we saw that right off, and they said, ‘This works.’”