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Val Kilmer    dies at 65

The Freeman
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Prolific American actor Val Kilmer has died at age 65, the New York Times reported yesterday. The cause of death was pneumonia. He had battled throat cancer following a 2014 diagnosis, but later recovered.

Kilmer burst onto the big screen full of charisma, cast as a rock star in Cold War spoof “Top Secret!” in 1984. Two years later, he gained fame as the cocky, if mostly silent fighter pilot in training Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in box office smash hit “Top Gun,” playing a rival to Tom Cruise’s “Maverick.”

After a cameo in Quentin Tarantino-written “True Romance,” Kilmer went on to star alongside Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in “Heat” and took a turn as the masked Gotham vigilante in “Batman Forever.”

A 1996 Entertainment Weekly cover story dubbed Kilmer “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate,” depicting him as a sometimes surly eccentric with exasperating work habits. A New York Times interviewer in 2002 said Kilmer “hardly lives up to that reputation” and found the actor instead “friendly, buoyant and so open that he often volunteers personal details about his life and is quick to laugh at himself.”

Chastened by a decade or more of low-budget movies, he was mounting a comeback in the 2010s with a successful stage show about Mark Twain that he hoped to turn into a film when he was struck by cancer.

When he reprised his role as “Iceman” in the long-awaited sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” Kilmer’s real-life health issues, and rasp of voice, were written into the character. (AFP)

VAL KILMER

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