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Born in Los Angeles on the last day of the '50s, Kilmer fast-tracked his way into movies. The youngest actor ever accepted at Manhattan's famed Juilliard School, he co-wrote and starred in a play at Joseph Papp's Public Theater when he was 21. Two years later he landed the lead role in his first big-screen picture, the 1984 spy spoof Top Secret! As a U.S. pop star in East Germany, Kilmer did his own expert vocalizing of the film's tunes, fought off bad guys in an underwater saloon, played an entire scene backward and pulled off his underwear without removing his pants.
After playing a whiz-kid scientist in Real Genius and the studly Iceman in Top Gun, Kilmer did the George Lucas-Ron Howard fantasy Willow, where he met the English beauty Joanne Whalley. They were married for seven years, producing two children; they split in 1995. Kilmer subsequently dated Cindy Crawford and recently had to dodge rumors of a tryst with his Saint co-star, Elisabeth Shue. Noyce says that was just Val the perfectionist, obsessed with highlighting the film's romantic glow. "He worked so minutely on this relationship that some crew members said they were having an affair," says Noyce. "I don't believe that was true, but they spent a lot of time in the caravan together, and it was all about trying to be free with each other."
Noyce, who chose Kilmer after Mel Gibson and Ralph Fiennes said no, thinks Kilmer's bad rep is a bad rap. "We knew all the horror stories," he says, "and I can only presume some may be true. But he was never like that with me." Noyce took the actor's suggestions about Simon's elaborate disguises (they give the film a lift and an edge) and pumping up the romance. "The truth is that we made a different film from the one Paramount financed," Kilmer says, "and they went along with it." They also paid for a new ending, shot in January, after preview groups nixed a death scene for Shue's character.
The Saint may be too dour to spark a series, but Kilmer is ready for whatever happens. "Movie careers can be a machine-gun thing," he says. "You do three jobs, one of them will hit. I've always been confident about trusting what I can get from acting." That sounds like Val Kilmer the realist, who plans a long career giving moviegoers pleasure and directors hell.
--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and David E. Thigpen/New York