Leading Man Val Kilmer Was Charismatic But Unpredictable

Five things to know about Val Kilmer

- Bruce Weber

LOS ANGELES — Val Kilmer, a Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died in Los Angeles on April 1. He was 65.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Mercedes Kilmer. Val Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, she added.

Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success.

He made his feature debut in a slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof, Top Secret! (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.

He gave a vividly stylized performance as American singer-songwriter Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis Presley — in True Romance (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.

Kilmer had top billing in Thunderheart (1992), playing an unseasoned Federal Bureau of Investigation agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in The Saint (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob.

Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney, he inhabited the title role in