Val Kilmer shared an eight-year and ultimately tragic marriage to his only wife, Joanne Whalley.
According to BBC, Kilmer met Whalley on the set of the movie Willow and married her in 1988. They had two kids named Jack and Mercedes and divorced in 1996, BBC reported.
Kilmer, 65, died on April 1 of pneumonia after a throat cancer battle for years, his daughter told The New York Times.
Kilmer “learned he was getting a divorce while watching CNN in a hotel room,” The Tampa Bay Times reported, quoting him as saying, “It was no fun.”
He told the newspaper that the divorce was “the second most expensive in New Mexico” and came “only two months after the birth of their second child.”
According to The Times, the marriage struggled due to “constant rumors about his on-set romances” and sex symbol status.
Actor Val Kilmer and actress Joanna Whalley attend the Liberty Hill Foundation’s Eighth Annual Upton Sinclair Awards on May 2, 1990 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.
“I miss my children every single way that’s possible, and ways I didn’t know were possible,” Kilmer said, according to The Times, but he was soon linked to model Cindy Crawford.
In his memoir, Kilmer wrote that he stopped dating, according to a 2020 People article.
“I haven’t had a girlfriend in 20 years. The truth is I am lonely part of every day,” Kilmer wrote.
Kilmer remained close to his kids with Whalley, People reported.
“My dad’s able to very artfully circumvent the limitations of his speech, so I learned so much watching him, how he communicated physically. It taught me so much about acting that expanded what I thought acting was, which was central to speech.” Mercedes Kilmer told People of her dad’s speech issues, which derived from his throat cancer.
