Film fans have been mourning the death of Top Gun star Val Kilmer, who has died at the age of 65, with many Hollywood stars rushing to pay tribute to the 80s and 90s legend.
Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes told the New York Times the actor had died from pneumonia.
The Willow actor was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, and discussed his diagnosis and recovery in his 2020 memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry and the Amazon Prime Documentary Val.
He underwent both radiotherapy and chemotherapy, as well as a tracheostomy, which damaged his vocal cords.
‘I obviously am sounding much worse than I feel,’ Kilmer said in the documentary.
‘I can’t speak without plugging this hole (in his throat). You have to make the choice to breathe or to eat.
‘It’s an obstacle that is very present with whoever sees me.’
What happened to Val Kilmer?
Apart from his reprisal of his fighter pilot role of Iceman in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, Kilmer was absent from screens over the past decades due to his throat cancer.
After his 2014 diagnosis and tracheostomy treatment, Kilmer struggled to speak, and only appeared in Top Gun: Maverick alongside Tom Cruise through the use of voice altering technology and the disease being incorporated into his character’s story.
Kilmer was set to reprise his role of Madmartigan in the Willow TV series on Disney Plus in 2020, but was forced to pull out ‘pretty late in the process’ due to ill health.
In a New York Times profile piece in 2020, the journalist described his voice as ‘something between a squeak and a voiceless roar’ and said he could be ‘somewhat understood’.
He was only coherent, he said, because of vocal exercises taken at performing arts conservatory The Julliard School when he was younger.
What is a tracheostomy?
A tracheostomy is a procedure to help air and oxygen reach the lungs. The operation creates an opening into the windpipe from outside the neck.
Having welcomed children Jack Kilmer and Mercedes Kilmer with his ex-wife Joanne Whalley, who he divorced in 1996, Kilmer was living in Malibu when he received the throat cancer diagnosis.
He discovered a big lump in his throat while touring a Citizen Twain stage production in Nashville.
Kilmer struggled to swallow and cancelled the show, having shown symptoms back home in Malibu, including waking up to blood on his pillow.
Val Kilmer’s Christian Science belief
As a life-long Christian Scientist, Kilmer sought to pray away the disease through the controversial practice of spiritual healing.
But while he wanted to go away with a Christian Science practitioner – which is essentially a spiritual advisor – to heal, his family did not subscribe to the same belief system.
To save them from fear, Kilmer underwent surgery in 2014, then chemotherapy, which he said made his throat dry for the rest of his days. Kilmer ate through a tube following his throat cancer treatment.
What do Christian Scientists believe?
Coined in the 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Scientists reject the idea that God created the material world (a narrow human perspective) but accepts God as an omnipotent, purposeful being.
They also reject the deity – but not divinity – of Jesus, and see him as proof that humans can overcome the mortal state through adopting ‘the mind of Christ’.
They do not believe in heaven, but a spiritual reality. Christian Scientists believe the cure of disease is prayer, and see ailments as mostly a mental error and not a physical one.
Despite undergoing chemotherapy, Kilmer denied he had cancer in 2016 when his co-star Michael Dougles mentioned it in a press conference.
Years later Kilmer doubled down on this, saying that he suffered from the treatment, rather than the disease.
Following his Christian Science beliefs, Kilmer thought that death was just a human limitation, and life would continue after.
His younger brother Wesley had epilepsy, and died in the family’s jacuzzi when Kilmer was in high school.
In 2020, Kilmer said he still had conversations with Wesley and his late mother, following his belief that while death means you can’t sense people in the same way, they are never truly gone.
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