He seemed, in the best and worst senses of the word, exhausting. He was a Method actor and mischief-maker, both nice ways of saying that a litany of filmmakers couldn’t stand him. On the set of 1995’s Batman Forever, one of his ill-fated attempts at name-above-the-title film stardom, he would show up late covered in blankets, clash with the crew, and say his lines so quietly that no one could hear them. “The two weeks where he didn’t speak to me [were] bliss,” its director Joel Schumacher once said. On The Island of Dr Moreau a year later, actors were so incensed by Kilmer’s surly behaviour that they’d ring up their agents begging to quit the film. Marlon Brando reportedly threw Kilmer’s phone in a bush and told him that he’d confused the size of his salary for the size of his talent. “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again,” said the film’s director John Frankenheimer.

Many of the films he desperately wanted to star in – Goodfellas and Full Metal Jacket, most notably – were ones he didn’t get. Those he fought for and did get were directed by men who seemed to match his odd mix of slick, cocksure madness. When Oliver Stone dithered over casting him in The Doors, Kilmer spent thousands of dollars of his own money to fund an elaborate, multi-scene audition reel in full Jim Morrison drag that he shot in his Laurel Canyon home. Stone gave him the part. Ultimately, he was so convincing as Morrison – dropping to his exact weight and learning to sing 50 songs by The Doors despite only needing to sing 15 for the film – that the band’s surviving members admitted that they couldn’t tell the difference between Morrison and Kilmer’s singing voices.