Prolific American actor Val Kilmer, who was propelled to fame with “Top Gun” and went on to starring roles as Batman and Jim Morrison, has died at age 65, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Mercedes Kilmer told the Times. He had battled throat cancer following a 2014 diagnosis, but later recovered, she said.

AFP has reached out to his representatives for comment.

Originally a stage actor, 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.”

A versatile character actor whose career spanned decades, Kilmer toggled between blockbusters and smaller-budget independent films. He got a shot at leading man status in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” depicting Jim Morrison’s journey from a psychedelics-loving LA film student to 60s rock frontman.

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,” between the Bruce Wayne portrayals by Michael Keaton and George Clooney.

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.”

“You have to learn to speak Val,” director D. J. Caruso told the newspaper.– ‘ Magical life’ –Born Val Edward Kilmer on New Year’s Eve 1959, he began acting in commercials as a child.

Kilmer was the youngest person ever accepted to the drama department at New York’s fabled Juilliard school, and made his Broadway debut in 1983 alongside Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.

In Hollywood, the Los Angeles native longed to make serious films but found himself in a series of schlocky blockbusters and expensive flops in the early 2000s.

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.

“Val,” an intimate documentary about Kilmer’s stratospheric rise and later fall in Hollywood, premiered at the Cannes film Festival in 2021 and showed him struggling for air after a tracheotomy.

Kilmer “has the aura of a man who was dealt his cosmic comeuppance and came through it,” US publication Variety wrote of the film.

“He fell from stardom, maybe from grace, but he did it his way.”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.“

Instead of treating Kilmer — and, indeed, the entire notion of Top Gun — as a throwaway nostalgia object, he’s given a celluloid swan song that’ll stand the test of time,” GQ wrote.

On his website, Kilmer said he had led a “magical life.”

“For more than half a century, I have been honing my art, no matter the medium. Be it literature, movies, poetry, painting, music, or tracking exotic and beautiful wildlife,” he wrote.

According to the Times, he is survived by two children, Mercedes and Jack Kilmer.

AFP

▪︎Collage of Dotun Oladipo, Publisher, The Eagle Online, (left), and Rotimi Olaleye, the mechanic.

I write this from the point of ‘Pain’ and ‘Gratitude’.

Pain because of the death of a hardworking and honest man, Rotimi Olaleye, who was both a great father, as attested to by his children who he has been taking care of single-handedly since his wife died about five years ago, and an honest and diligent auto mechanic, as confirmed by his clients, including yours truly. 

We met less than a week before his death, but he left an unforgettable impression on me, even in death. Gratitude?

I was less than 10 seconds away from where Mr. Olaleye was when the fire that took his life occurred with my wife and first child.

Let me start from the beginning. I met Mr. Olaleye on March 8, 2025, following a need to change my mechanic.

I was introduced to him by the best car air conditioning technician I had ever met, Mr. Akinola Ayeni. We drove the car together on that day.

He spotted some issues, including the fact that the former handler was as careless as not putting the knots that should be holding the connecting ABS wire to the wheel of the driver’s side, by just driving the car.

That was quickly fixed. And he told me, very honestly, that other things had to wait until Monday. That he needed to finish some other jobs. I left happily.

On Monday, I took the car to him. He appeared meticulous. Aside from the fact, that I told him that on completing the work on the Highlander, which my wife uses, I was going to send my car for servicing, he was not in a hurry to declare the vehicle fit. people behind me.

One woman came out of her car and started banging ours: “Move, move.”

She did it a second time and I wound down the back glass, addressing her and my wife who had also become agitated: “We have a man down there. Let’s see if there is still something we can do before we go too far.”

And then his line stopped ringing. My head immediately told me to call Mr. Ayeni. As soon as he picked it up, he asked me: “Have you collected your car? Rotimi has parked by the gate and is waiting for you.”

He did not even hear me saying there was trouble at the workshop until I shouted at the top of my voice.

Mr. Ayeni, who was at Agidingbi, immediately turned back. He, alongside others, discovered the remains of Mr. Olaleye, lying face down. His apprentices who were with him said as the truck crashed, he told them to flee that he needed to “save his customer’s car”.

Meanwhile, his own car was just behind mine. He succeeded in turning the car around to face the workshop. But that was as far as he made it. I cried that night. Something I have not done in several years. I wept bitterly.

In the short period I knew Mr. Olaleye, I learned a lot of lessons.

He left an impact I would never forget. But it was a pity he didn’t pick up my last call, which was to tell him to abandon the car and flee to safety.

His meticulousness on the job was second to none from what I saw in the three days of being with him. He also knew his job. Adieu Mr. Olaleye.

■ SylvaNews

Carl Dean, the husband of Dolly Parton, has died Monday, aged 82.

The couple were married for almost 60 years, but the country music superstar kept out of the spotlight.

Dolly Parton said “Carl and I spent many wonderful years together.

“Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years,” Parton wrote in a post on X.

Dolly met Dean in 1964 outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville, Tennessee. At the time, she was 18 and he was 21.

“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” she said.

“He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about,” she added.

They married two years later in May 1966 in a simple ceremony attended only by Parton’s mother, the preacher and his wife.