The Genius of Val Kilmer

His parents divorced when he was nine years old. At the age of 12 he failed his first television commercial audition because he did not like the taste of the hamburgers that was being promoted.

At seventeen he became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the drama department of the Juilliard School in New York (1977).

Born on December 31,1959 in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, California. Val Kilmer, has two brothers, one of the brothers, Wesley Kilmer, drowned in 1977.

He lives on a 30 acre ranch, in a rustic adobe cabin in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has two children by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (British actress, who was once voted one of the world's sexiest women). A daughter, Mercedes, born in 1991, and a son, Jack, born in 1995. They met while filming the movie Willow and married in June 1988, changing her name to Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. In 1995 she filed for divorce.

Val's talents have a vast range of actor, documentary filmmaker, playwright and poet. With a dramatic Shakespearean background from Julliard, Val has appeared in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I and How It All Began, a play he had co-written (1981), As You Like It (1982), Richard III.

In 1983 he made his off-Broadway debut in John Byrne's The Slab Boys, in which he played opposite Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. He played in two great comedies, Top Secret! (1984) as an amiable spy/teen and in Real Genius (1985) a coolly confident whiz kid .

Kilmer received his first major role as Tom Cruise's nemesis Ice in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun. In 1988 he had the title role in Hamlet for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder and in a 1992 production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore, a Jacobean tragedy about a brother-sister incest relationship.

The movie Thunderheart (1992), Kilmer (part-Cherokee in real life), portrayed a part-Sioux FBI agent assigned to investigate a murder on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s. Val supplied Elvis Presley’s voice in the movie True Romance (1993), written by Quentin Tarantino. That same year he played a bank robber in The Real McCoy costarring with Kim Basinger.

He completed a third project that year as the gunslinger Doc Holliday in George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp. Kilmer is the author of a collection of poetry, My Eden After Burns, which contains "The Pfeiffer Howls at the Moon," a testament to his past romance with the actress Michelle Pfeiffer.

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