“Most actors recognize there’s something different in Val than meets the eye,” Mr. Stone said in a 2007 interview for a segment of the television series “Biography.” David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter who directed Mr. Kilmer in the political thriller “Spartan” (2004), added, “What Val has as an actor is something that the really, really great actors have, which is they make everything sound like an improvisation.”
On the screen, he was both charismatic and curiosity-piquing, an actor who didn’t let his characters give emotional clues away easily. Off the screen, he had his share of disagreements, especially early in his career, when he earned a reputation for surliness and self-involvement. A 1996 cover article about him in Entertainment Weekly was titled “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.”
“He offended people by being hard to understand,” said Mr. Stone, one of several people over the years who said Mr. Kilmer turned them off before turning them back on again. Robert Downey Jr., who co-starred with Mr. Kilmer in the wry 2005 murder mystery “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” acknowledged in the “Biography” segment that he couldn’t stand him when they first met, though they eventually became great friends.
“I’m sure this can’t be news to you that he’s chronically eccentric,” Mr. Downey said.
Val Edward Kilmer was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 1959, and grew up in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the far northwest part of the city, where his neighbors were Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and his high school classmates were Kevin Spacey and Mare Winningham. His father, Eugene, a real estate developer, and his mother, the former Gladys Ekstadt, divorced when Val was 9. His younger brother Wesley drowned in a swimming pool in 1977, an event that haunted Mr. Kilmer for years afterward.
His memories of that loss were at the center of his performance in “The Salton Sea” (2002), about a man driven by guilt and seeking redemption after witnessing the murder of his wife and being unable to save her. “There are several points in the movie where the guy just can’t go on,” Mr. Kilmer said in an interview with The New York Times in 2002. “I didn’t really get back to earth until about two or three years after my brother died.”
He applied to the Juilliard School in New York and at 17 became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting program there. At Juilliard, he and several classmates wrote and performed “How It All Began,” adapted from the autobiography of the West German urban guerrilla Michael Baumann. In 1981, after Mr. Kilmer graduated, he appeared in a professional production of the play at the Public Theater.
