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How Val Kilmer Lived By His Own Set of Rules: ‘He Was Always Eccentric’

PEOPLE's cover story looks at the iconic career and great loves of Hollywood rebel Val Kilmer, who lived by his own set of rules. 'He was always eccentric,' says one former director.

During the filming of the 1993 western Tombstone, writer Kevin Jarre recalled, he and Kilmer were deep in conversation about the actor’s character, Doc Holliday, when a stand-in “brought over a very colorful sort of locust and said, ‘Look what I found!’ . As a kid in Los Angeles’s Chatsworth neighborhood, growing up on a property that had once belonged to cowboy star Roy Rogers, Kilmer began studying acting in grammar school, already dreaming of emulating Hollywood’s eccentric nonpareil, Marlon Brando. One of the youngest students ever admitted to the Juilliard School, Kilmer was just heading off to New York City to start classes when he learned that Wesley, who had epilepsy, had died back home: He suffered a seizure in a Jacuzzi and drowned at the age of 15.

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