Film Studies: The pristine, pouting legend of Val Kilmer - and why I hope he lives to enjoy it

In the throng of a London New Year's eve party not so long ago I found myself jammed in a corner with an amiable lady of middle age. In the mounting atmospheric of good champagne, it slowly dawned on me that she was, or had been, the mother-in-law of Val Kilmer. Of course, this meant that she was mother to the English actress, Joanne Whalley (she of the sexiest, ironic eyes) who had been married for half a dozen or so years to Kilmer. So, yes, the facts were "correct", which is not the same as plausible. What I mean by that is the sheer unlikelihood that the pristine and legendary Kilmer needed anything like a mother-in-law. As gently as I could, I plied the fond ex-relative with questions about the notorious Val. Well, yes, she admitted, he was a troubled boy - but very nice, really.

In the throng of a London New Year's eve party not so long ago I found myself jammed in a corner with an amiable lady of middle age. In the mounting atmospheric of good champagne, it slowly dawned on me that she was, or had been, the mother-in-law of Val Kilmer. Of course, this meant that she was mother to the English actress, Joanne Whalley (she of the sexiest, ironic eyes) who had been married for half a dozen or so years to Kilmer. So, yes, the facts were "correct", which is not the same as plausible. What I mean by that is the sheer unlikelihood that the pristine and legendary Kilmer needed anything like a mother-in-law. As gently as I could, I plied the fond ex-relative with questions about the notorious Val. Well, yes, she admitted, he was a troubled boy - but very nice, really.

And maybe that is as close as we're going to get to the secret of Val Kilmer. Meanwhile, let's admit that he is a phenomenon among actors - I was going to add "young", but in truth he will be 45 this New Year's Eve (yes, that is his birthday), and even if he has as many as eight films coming our way (the first of which is David Mamet's Spartan), he is never going to be Jim Morrison again (unless the fanciful rumours that the leader of The Doors actually survived and lives still in a drug-haze on the Mexican border prove to be correct).

In many ways, Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors is archetypal Val Kilmer. It is a very enjoyable bad film, such as only Stone can manage, and almost the definition of pretentious. Yet it delivers one of those extraordinary, sensual male performances such as Stone is capable of - in so many ways, Stone needs to desire his own actors. Grant, too, that the young Kilmer was not just handsome, but beautiful, in the way of Jim Morrison; that he was insolent, pouty, dangerous and self-destructive; and the film is truly fascinating - not least because Kilmer actually sings the great Morrison songs himself.

Fact and legend quickly built upon each other: on the one hand Kilmer was said to be a demanding perfectionist, likely to boast of his Julliard training and his private money, very difficult to work with and unendurably lofty in his aspirations; on the other hand, he added to The Doors, two remarkable and offbeat Westerns. For television, he played the lead, gay and ultra sensitive in Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid, which was Vidal's loyalty to his own The Left Handed Gun, a project which, when filmed (with Paul Newman) lost a lot of the gayness. And then, thin as a rail, gaunt with TB and a scar of a moustache, he was a superb, foppish Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), a film that made the Kevin Costner Wyatt Earp feel painfully moribund (though Dennis Quaid was also pretty good as its Holliday).

In a way, Kilmer seemed poised: after all, he had been Tom Cruise's chief rival in Top Gun (and most people could see that he had greater range than Cruise); he played the lead role in Batman Forever; he and Michael Douglas were in Africa in The Ghost and the Darkness; and he would get his own chance at a super-hero franchise in The Saint (1997). He may have betrayed his own claims of prestige by standing in for Keanu Reeves in Michael Mann's Heat, but then he delivered a magnificent performance as the conflicted second-lead outlaw in that film. His wordless parting from Ashley Judd was not just touching to a degree, it was the best thing the actress has ever done - and her pain seemed willed by Kilmer's samurai authority.

But Batman as a role has never yet helped an actor, and The Saint was a flat-out disaster. Coming up on 40, Kilmer seemed the victim of his own reputation. You could say he was adventurous in his choices - for example in playing Willem De Kooning in Ed Harris's Pollock - but other projects revealed an actor hard up for work. In D J Caruso's The Salton Sea - trashy but great fun, and never opened in Britain theatrically - he was in and out of confused identity, drugs, sex, jazz and the Mexican border. It was exactly the kind of movie that an extant but stoned Jim Morrison might have made, and if it indulged a good many of the actor's fantasies, it had that straight-to-video sadness all through it.

Was this the end of the road? He had a small part in a dreadful Bob Dylan picture, Masked and Anonymous; he played porn star John Holmes in Wonderland; and he was unrecognisable in a small role in The Missing, an assignment that may have come from the kindness of director Ron Howard who, 15 years earlier, had cast Kilmer and Joanne Whalley in the fantasy adventure film Willow.

With a personality like Kilmer's, there is no guarantee. But he still looks wonderful: indeed, he has that mixture of sensuality and disappointed experience that kept Robert Mitchum going for a long time. And in interviews, Kilmer has been heard to admit that he got out of line sometimes so that now he is happy just to be working. His FBI agent in Spartan is a good, relaxed performance. He seems prepared to trust the complicated thriller story, to stand there and be photographed, saying as little as possible.

That's what turned Mitchum from an actor into a god. And there are several other projects still to come, the most intriguing of which is surely the Oliver Stone Alexander, in which Kilmer is Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell). In real life, it seems, Philip was 26 when he fathered Alexander and just about Kilmer's real age now when he was murdered - possibly by his wife Olympias (Angelina Jolie in the film).

Yes, Alexander may turn out as bad as Troy... no, that's not possible. Oliver Stone has his areas of weakness, but he could never be as dull as Troy. In addition, Stone needs a triumphant come-back, after a few years in the wilderness. I suspect that he is ideally suited to grasp the terrible rivalry of father and son, and I can believe in his fertile imagination dreaming up rich ways in which Angelina Jolie might eliminate Kilmer. After all, these are two of the great mouths of the modern screen: smothered by kisses, anyone?

Of course, there are those who will always lament Kilmer's straying from his fine training and immense potential. But among the great disasters Kilmer has made was the 1996 The Island of Dr Moreau, where he played opposite Marlon Brando. Kilmer is not far from as beautiful as Brando once was, and in the same league in terms of promise. Dr Moreau may have been an experience in which Kilmer learned that a great actor and his dark moods may confine him on an island forever. Whereas a real actor can travel the world. As it is, Kilmer has already made far more films than Brando ever attempted.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Spartan' is released on 6 August