Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishThe polite word is ‘perfectionist’ but most people in Hollywood simply called Val Kilmer a pain in the backside.Kilmer, who has died aged 65 from pneumonia, following a painful battle with cancer, starred in a long list of blockbusters – including Top Gun opposite Tom Cruise, and Oliver Stone’s psychedelic rock biopic The Doors, as singer Jim Morrison.Kilmer’s list of megastar girlfriends was even longer, among them Cher, Cindy Crawford, Daryl Hannah and Angelina Jolie, as well as his wife, British actress Joanne Whalley.But he is most likely to be remembered for his truculence, vanity and impossible sense of entitlement – extraordinary even by the standards of an industry fuelled by narcissism.On the set of Batman Forever in 1995, he stubbed out a cigarette in the face of a cameraman who dared to argue with him.Turning up late for filming every day, often dishevelled and wrapped in a blanket, he insisted the crew address him as ‘Mr Kilmer’. Val Kilmer in uniform as Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky in Top Gun opposite Tom Cruise. He tried to back out of the role but was forced by the studio to honour his contract Kilmer also appeared in 1991 film The Doors, playing singer Jim MorrisonTo show his contempt for the comic-book role, which he regarded as an insult to his drama training at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, he spoke his lines in an inaudible whisper.He claimed the rubber Batsuit was so tight that he could barely move, let alone act.The director, Joel Schumacher, later labelled him ‘psychotic’.’He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate,’ Schumacher said. ‘I was forced to tell him that this would not be tolerated for one more second. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss.’When the actor appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote his 1997 remake of The Saint, she asked him if the ‘sweater story’ was true – the rumour that, before he was able to tackle the role of the all-action sleuth Simon Templar, he demanded to be shown more than 1,000 polo-neck jumpers, searching for the ideal piece of knitwear that would enable him to inhabit the character.Sweaters were flown in from across America and Europe, even Moscow. None was right. Kilmer claimed he didn’t find the woollie he really needed until filming was over, when he spotted it in a shop window in London. Perhaps that’s why, when we think of The Saint today, we picture the unflappable Roger Moore, making a standard roll-neck sweater look like a tuxedo rather than Kilmer’s version.For the breakthrough role that made him a star, as rocker Nick Rivers in the 1983 comedy Top Secret!, he learned to play the guitar – then complained bitterly that the director wanted him to look like he was faking it.Kilmer’s egotism was so overpowering that, three days into filming on 1996’s The Island Of Dr Moreau opposite Marlon Brando, he announced he would not continue unless the South African director, Richard Stanley, was fired.He got his way, even though Moreau was Stanley’s personal project, the movie he’d dreamed of making since reading the HG Wells novel as a boy.Stanley was replaced as director by John Frankenheimer, who soon discovered the downside of working with two of Hollywood’s leading prima donnas. Neither Brando nor Kilmer wanted to be the first to emerge from their trailer for a day’s filming, with the result that cast and crew would sit around for hours waiting for work to begin. Frankenheimer later vowed: ‘There are two things I will never do: climb Mount Everest and work again with Val Kilmer. There isn’t enough money in the world.’On another occasion, he said to some of the actors: ‘If I was directing a film called The Life Of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that p***k in it.’Despite his box office success, by the 2000s Kilmer’s reputation was so shot to pieces that few established directors would hire him.In 2001, he made a low-budget movie, The Salton Sea, for first-time director DJ Caruso. At the end of one long shoot, the star became so exasperated by delays that he picked up a whisky bottle and hurled it with all his strength. Before his marriage, Kilmer had also dated Cher. For a few months in 1983 they lived together in her apartment at the top of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas After his split from Ms Whalley, Kilmer met supermodel Cindy Crawford, who visited him on location when he was making The Saint – including in MoscowSome reports said the bottle was aimed at Caruso’s head. Co-star Doug Hutchison claimed Kilmer simply smashed it on the ground, but that shards of glass narrowly missed the camera crew. ‘Sometimes just being in Val’s orbit was like taking a hit of blotter acid,’ he said, referring to the hallucinogen LSD.Despite his strict upbringing as a Christian Scientist, Kilmer was an enthusiastic drug-user.When he stayed at the Dorchester in London, production assistants placed scented candles around his suite in an effort to mask the smell of marijuana.He was also a heavy cigarette smoker, which might have caused the throat cancer that left him coughing up blood while staying with ex-girlfriend Cher at her mock-Venetian palazzo in Malibu.’One morning, I had been reading Baudelaire’s The Flowers Of Evil and listening to the waves crash,’ he wrote in his 2020 autobiography, I’m Your Huckleberry. ‘Poetry always calms my soul, consuming it and creating it.’He dozed off and woke up in a puddle of blood. The way he told it, Cher ‘stepped up and stilled my spirit,’ then started flirting with the paramedic, ‘who was drop-dead handsome’.Kilmer claimed to possess the power of telepathy: he sent her a mental message, ‘You’ll have this guy by the stroke of midnight,’ which apparently reduced her to embarrassed laughter.He and Cher got together when he was, at 23, ‘really young’, and she was 36. For a few months in 1983 they lived together in her apartment at the top of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. ‘Cher trafficked in intoxicating glamour,’ he said.’I was madly in love with Val and he left,’ she said last year, admitting that the age gap had been a factor. He was one of ‘the few’ who ever had the nerve to dump her. But they kept in touch and remained close friends as he went through a decade of cancer treatment.Kilmer’s mother Gladys was a dedicated Christian Scientist, who imbued her son with a deep interest in spirituality and past lives.Aged 24, he claimed to have had a vision of a black-robed figure who pulled out his heart and replaced it with a bigger one. This was not Death, he believed, but its counterpart, the Angel of Life. But a central tenet of Christian Science is that faith can conquer all sickness. Kilmer fought his cancer with what he called ‘mental attitude… It’s half of the healing – making sure the mind is free, in the morning, of limitations’.That said, he supplemented his mind-over-matter approach with chemotherapy and two tracheotomies to bypass swollen lymph nodes in his throat. This left him barely able to talk, though by covering the airhole under his chin with his fingers, he was able to gasp a few words.This ravaged voice can be heard on the 2021 Amazon Prime documentary Val, compiled from his own home video footage – like Peter Sellers, Kilmer filmed himself and his surroundings, wherever he went, however much other people objected.The narrator on Val was his son, Jack, one of his two children. It was his other child, Mercedes, who broke the news of her father’s death to the world.She is an actor and producer, who appeared opposite her father in the 2020 film Paydirt.Kilmer met their mother, Joanne Whalley, on the set of the 1988 fantasy Willow, and honeymooned in Tahiti on Brando’s private island, but his constant affairs tore the marriage apart. He discovered she had filed for divorce when legal documents were leaked to CNN and he saw the resulting report while watching TV in a hotel room.The settlement, he claimed, was ‘the second most expensive in New Mexico history’.By the time of the split, he was already being comforted by supermodel Cindy Crawford. They met in 1995 at the premiere of Batman Forever, and she began visiting him on location – in Australia, in Africa and in Moscow, where he was making The Saint. ‘Oh God, I loved Cindy and just kept loving her,’ he said. ‘I thought I could have died from her love, not because it was difficult but because its delight was simply too much to bear. I would die of happiness.’But director Phillip Noyce noted that, by the time filming on The Saint moved to London, ‘Cindy suddenly wasn’t there’.He took up with Michelle Pfeiffer, who was internationally feted for her role opposite Al Pacino in Scarface.But she was married to actor Peter Horton and Kilmer admitted years later that it was Michelle’s younger sister Dedee whom he really lusted after.Flings with actress Ellen Barkin and producer Jaycee Gossett followed. His most painful break-up, he said, was his split from Daryl Hannah in 2001: ‘I cried every single day for half a year,’ he said. ‘I was recused from an icy inferno of solitude by another angel. Perhaps the most soulful and serious of them all,’ he wrote. ‘Angelina Jolie. She’s like other women and other superstars but just more gorgeous, more wise, more tragic, more magic, more grounded.’Angelina left him in 2005, and took up with Brad Pitt soon afterwards.Like Val, his father Gene Kilmer was a womaniser whose infidelities put impossible strains on his family.The son of a Cherokee mother and a gold prospector, Gene was raised in a log cabin on Zuni Native American land in New Mexico.Val, born in 1959 and named after one of Gene’s business associates, was one of three boys who grew up running wild around their beachfront home at Playa del Rey. Most of the land was part of a ranch owned by cowboy star Roy Rogers, whose Cadillac gave Val his first glimpse of Hollywood glamour: ‘Suede throughout with inlaid silver dollars, saddles for bucket seats, a Winchester rifle for a steering wheel and giant horns on the hood.’But Kilmer’s career was hampered and ultimately destroyed by the limitations he put on himself. Even at the height of his fame, he was begging for roles he didn’t get, and turning down others most actors would kill to play. He wanted to star in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket so badly that he shot his own audition tape, wading through a river with an assault rifle in U.S. military fatigues. Kubrick ignored him.But when David Lynch offered him a leading part in Mulholland Drive, one of the 1980s’ undisputed classic films, Kilmer rejected it, saying he didn’t like the script.He also tried to back out of 1986 hit movie Top Gun, playing the pilot Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky opposite Tom Cruise as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. The studio forced him to honour his contract.It was Cruise, loyal to the end, who insisted that Kilmer be cast in Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 sequel.Like Kilmer, Kazansky – who had risen to the rank of admiral – is dying of throat cancer and unable to speak, but wanted to talk with Maverick one final time.In his calmer moments, Kilmer understood that his life was a long trail of self-destruction. He said he once heard the voice of his dead brother Wesley, who drowned aged 15.Wesley had some advice: ‘No one wants to see or hear a handsome, successful, talented writer-actor-director who gets the most impossible-to-get girls in the world complain about a damn thing.’If only he’d listened.
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