Val Kilmer’s daughter shares heartbreaking tribute on his birthday
Val Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes is honoring her late father.
On what would have been the “Top Gun” star’s 66th birthday, his daughter, 34, took to Instagram to pen a touching tribute.
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“My dad would have been 66 today,” Mercedes wrote alongside a carousel of 20 pictures, “born on the last day of the fifties ❤️ so grateful to all my friends for getting me through 2025.”
The images included shots of Kilmer, who died of pneumonia in April 2025, as a child, in various movies throughout his career, on his wedding day with ex-wife Joanne Whalley, 64, and with Mercedes and son Jack, 30.
Kilmer was married to Whalley, whom he shared Mercedes and Jack with, from 1988 to 1996.
Despite the short-lived marriage, the “Batman” actor remained a constant in his kids’ lives.
“I can’t be a responsible parent and only be there three or four months a year,” Kilmer told Vanity Fair in 2012.
In 2020, Mercedes starred in the film “Paydirt” alongside her dad.
“The producer called me up and asked me if I would play this role and I said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve found anybody yet to play my daughter, but I might have someone for you. Her name is Mercedes Kilmer and perhaps you’d be interested in meeting with her,’” Kilmer told People at the time. “Mercedes and the producer met and they all had a ball.”
In the film, the actor played a sheriff who had a speech disability that mirrored his real life.
Kilmer went through a two-year throat cancer battle after being diagnosed in 2015. He underwent two tracheotomies, which permanently altered the sound of his voice, but he later recovered.
“It’s pretty historic to have a lead with a speech disability,” Mercedes acknowledged to People. “I hope that it heralds more doors opening like that in the future.”
The actress also opened up about her dad’s health battle.
“It’s obvious my dad’s speech is compromised and so this whole experience revealed the personal effort I had put into working with actors with a disability, which I hadn’t done before,” Mercedes reflected. “It revealed how much I had to gain from working with people who have different abilities. 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.”
Kilmer, meanwhile, felt he learned “everything — life itself” from Mercedes.
And the bumps in the road brought the pair closer together.
“The health challenges have been just that, challenging, but so many good things have come out of it,” Mercedes detailed. “We all spend so much time together. Even just getting to meet all my dad’s friends from before I was born — there are so many beautiful things that happen when you need help from people.”
“My dad is such a smart and creative person that I love hanging out with, even if he wasn’t my dad, too,” she gushed.
Kilmer himself went on to praise both his kids as “really brilliant.”
“I am just madly, wildly entertained by them,” continued Kilmer. “My only gripe is that I never see them enough, so I never get enough of the wild entertainment that everyone else gets, but they’re really, really, entertaining.”
Kilmer and his son Jack, who narrated his dad’s 2021 documentary “Val,” also shared a close bond.
“I wouldn’t say things surprised me about my dad. He’s such an open person that I know very well,” Mercedes, who served as an associate producer on the Prime Video doc, told Entertainment Tonight at the time. “But it did really surprise me to see it with an audience. I’m so used to people not understanding my dad. I’m so used to his public image being different than the playful, funny person that we know.”
Kilmer was last photographed five years before his death while with Mercedes.
The two were pictured attending the annual Thespians Go Hollywood Gala at Avalon Hollywood on Nov. 18, 2019.
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