Biography – Ash Clifton, Writer

R.I.P. Frank Gehry

I find it interesting that the two most famous architects in American history—famous, that is, among ordinary people who don’t subscribe to Architectural Digest—were both named Frank. They were, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. Both men created buildings that captured the popular imagination like few others. And both were mavericks whose vision of what architecture could do often offended the mavens of the status quo (not to mention the bean-counters who worked for the rich people who funded their projects).

Both men also shared a sense of play and in their work—Gehry to a much greater degree, sometimes designing homes and offices and other buildings that veered into pure fantasy. He often brainstormed new projects with strips of paper and cardboard, envisioning light, fluid, soaring structures that, one could argue, would not have been possible to actually build in an age before computer-assisted design was available.

This emphasis on play and the power of imagination was evident in all his work, even in huge, civic projects like his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. As Paul Goldberger relates in his fine biography, Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, Gehry took an almost impish pleasure in fooling around with his own designs. When he was in the early stages of mocking-up his plans for another auditorium in Asia, he shocked and amazed his colleagues by adjusting the position for the auditorium every night or so. As one friend put it,

…[H]e became a monster. He started moving stuff around.… We were doing a project in Korea that never got built [the museum for Samsung] but every time I went on a trip and came back he had moved the auditorium. He was impeccable. He had incredible reasons for it. He’s really brilliant. He doesn’t sleep at night and he comes back the next morning and moves the auditorium.”

As Goldberger explains…

Moving the auditorium, in Frank’s view, was a form of what he liked to call “play,” and it was largely instinctive. “A serious CEO, you would imagine, does not think of creative spirit as play. And yet it is,” he said. “Creativity, the way I characterize it, is that you’re searching for something. You have a goal. You’re not sure where it’s going. So when I meet with my people and start thinking and making models and stuff, it is like play.”

As the title of Goldberger’s book relates, Gehry saw himself almost as more an artist than an architect. At times, he refused to believe that one needed, necessarily, to make a distinction between the two. Early in his career, Gehry befriended and hung-out with great modern artists in Southern California, and they reciprocated his admiration. Perhaps this is the reason that Gehry’s greatest buildings resemble art more than perhaps other architect.

His most famous is, of course, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. When the museum finally opened in 1987, a flood of tourists came from all over the world to see it, prompting some of the artists whose work was displayed inside the museum to feel that they were playing second fiddle to the building itself. This grumbling grew into a modest backlash among the artistic community, focused not so much on Gehry himself as on the fawning admiration of journalists and other architects who often lauded Gehry as an “artist.” As Gehry’s own collaborator and friend, the sculptor Richard Serra, said,

I don’t believe Frank is an artist. I don’t believe Rem Koolhaas is an artist. Sure, there are comparable overlaps in the language between sculpture and architecture, between painting and architecture. There are overlaps between all kinds of human activities. But there are also differences that have gone on for centuries.”

Whether he was being lauded or criticized, Gehry himself never seemed concerned. In fact, when compared to that other great architect named Frank, Gehry usually seemed downright humble, if not pathologically shy. Goldberger writes:

Even though Gehry was ridden with angst throughout his life, his manner came off as relaxed, low-key, and amiable, and his steely determination, far from being obvious like Wright’s, was hidden behind an easygoing exterior, a kind of “aw shucks” air that Gehry’s old friend the artist Peter Alexander called “his gentle, humble ways.” Wright was never mistaken for being modest; Gehry often was.

Gehry was so shy, in fact, that I feel he could have been much more famous than he was if he gotten himself out there, gone on TV more and granted more interviews and written some puff-pieces for various magazines and web sites. The fact that he did not is, I suppose, the most telling fact about the man’s character. Namely, that he was a genius who was determined to create the most original and uplifting works as he could…and, then, to let those works speak for themselves.

Godspeed, Mr. Gehrey….

OTD, Richard Burton was Born

A lady I follow on Twitter named @johnstonglenn posted earlier that on this day in 1925, the famous Welsh actor Richard Burton was born. Yes, this would have been the great man’s 100^th birthday.

I’ve written about Burton a lot on this blog (see links below), and so I thought I would share this bit of trivia. A fabulously gifted Shakespearean actor, Burton had the second-greatest voice in Western theater (after James Earl Jones, who had the very best). But Burton wasn’t just a great voice. He was a deeply intelligent man who brought enormous power to every part he played. And soul. Lots of it. (He was a bit like Viggo Mortensen in that last regard, actually). If you’ve never seen a Burton film and are looking for a good one to start with, I recommend 1965’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A snippet of it is shown below.

Scene from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

One indication of Diane Keaton’s greatness is the simple fact that two of the most iconic of the 1970s end with her face. That is, with her face literally filling their final frames, as she looks straight at the viewer. These films are, of course, The Godfather (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). In the former, her character, Kay, gives a stricken expression as she watches her young husband, Michael Corleone, go over to the Dark Side of the Force to become, at last, the new godfather of his crime family. In the Looking for Mr. Goodbar, her character, Theresa, lies on the floor in her darkened apartment, dying. She has just been fatally stabbed by a psycho guy she picked up at a bar. The guy runs off, and the camera stays fixed on her face as she breathes her last breath, alone.

I’m not sure which ending is more disturbing. In both cases, her character dies a kind of death (spiritual, in The Godfather; literal in Looking for Mr. Goodbar). And this death is brought on, directly or indirectly, by a man’s act of evil. This might seem ironic, given the fact that Keaton, more than other female star, best embodied the spirit of the New Woman, especially the second-wave version that swept the culture in the 60s and 70s. In fact, it’s not ironic at all. In both films, she becomes a kind of casualty-of-war, defiant but ultimately destroyed by a male-centered (if not actually misogynistic) culture.

No, I am not trying to define Keaton’s long, brilliant career through the single lens of feminism-vs-toxic-masculinity. But you can’t talk about Diane Keaton without considering how important a symbol she was for both boys and girls watching movies when I was growing up. From the moment she appeared on-screen at the titular character in Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall, she captured the heart of a generation. Dressed in men’s clothing, she was beautiful, elegant, and breath-takingly feminine. With her goofy demeanor, mixed with her sharp-as-a-whip intellect, she was the gawky, A-student who all the smart, gawky, A-student girls in the audience could look up to (and who all the A-student guys secretly fell in love with.)

As with any movie star of any gender, it is impossible to separate Keaton’s appeal from her physiognomy. She was, of course, beautiful, but in a more muted, subtle way than someone like Jacqueline Bisset, Britt Ekland, Jill St. John, or any other of the “off-the-charts-sexy” actresses of her generation. (On my list of 15 Hollywood Archetypes, Keaton would sit firmly in the “Goddess Next Door” bucket.) To me, the most remarkable thing about Keaton was the way she always seemed to glow. She was literally luminous, in all her films, an attribute that a cynic might write-off as a testament to good genetics (i.e., good skin), or perhaps expert lighting.

Being a bit of mystical, woo-hoo type, I would call it the emanation of her sublime, inner being, filtering out into our mortal plane…

She carried this luminous quality into old age. Alas, though she was 79, she left us too soon.

Godspeed, Ms. Keaton!

R.I.P. Robert Redford

The great scholar Joseph Campbell once explained that every time we go into a cinema and see a movie star—Tom Cruise, for example—up on the screen, some part of our brains is aware that the real person, the actor Tom Cruise, is alive somewhere else in that same, exact moment. This ability to exist in two places at once, Campbell said, is an aspect of a God, a living divinity.

Our subconscious perception of actors as gods is one reason we are always surprised by the death of a movie star, especially one who has been around since we, ourselves, were kids. How could they ever die? They seem to occupy a higher plane of reality, immortal, always youthful if not actually young.

Robert Redford was surely one of the greatest movie stars of my youth, and he starred in two of my favorite films of all time, All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, both of which I have written about on this blog. What made him interesting was that weird dichotomy of blond, athletic, all-American good-looks combined with a reserved, wary intelligence. (On my list of Hollywood Archetypes, he fits squarely in the “Dark Prince” slot.) He was a very smart man, who did a lot of amazing things both on-screen and off-. Among the most notable of these was his founding of the Sundance Film Festival, which has come to rival Cannes as the preferred venue for indie-film directors to premiere their movies.

The fact that Redford would create an alternative festival for “the little guys” in the film industry was typical. He was, in some ways, the most counter-cultural movie star of the last fifty years—even more so than Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda—in that he made movies about men fighting some vast, evil establishment. Often, this was the military-industrial complex in either its actual (All the President’s Men) or its fantasy (Three Days of the Condor) form. In his later years, when Redford could no longer play the lead, he took on the role of the villain who represents this evil empire, as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

As a kid, I always found something soothing about Robert Redford, even in movies filled with threats and violence. I suspect that, in my mind, he represented the best spirit of my parents’ generation (he was roughly the same age as my father). That is, the young adults of the 1960s and 70s. Post-hippie, but very hip. World-weary, but not broken. Brave, but not foolhardy. Idealistic, but not naïve.

And, above all, ready to fight the system.

Godspeed, Mr. Redford…

R.I.P. Bill Moyers

If you were a nerdy poor kid growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, you probably watched a lot of public television. Starting with kid shows like Sesame Street and the Electric Company, you graduated in your teens to science shows like Nova and edgy entertainment shows like Monty Python and surreal action series like The Prisoner, which PBS stations played late at night.

As for myself, I also watched a lot of PBS news, especially The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. And Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill moyers. If MacNeil and Lehrerwere the Kings of PBS news, then Bill Moyer was the high-ranking courtier. Moyers, who passed away last week, specialized in thoughtful and intelligent interviews with brilliant people of various stripes. As a would-be teenage intellectual, I really loved and appreciated these shows, and they introduced me to a lot of very smart artists, politicians, and writers. Chief among these was the iconic scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell. Moyers’s now-famous interviews with Campbell, conducted at George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch (Lucas was inspired by Campbell’s writing when he penned the Star Wars saga), were probably the pinnacle of both men’s careers.

I’ve been a fan of Campbell ever since, and also of Moyers. A one-time Baptist preacher, Moyers was a gentle, kind-spirited man who never descended into sentimentality or fatuous optimism. He was, rather, a first-rate journalist. And God knows there are very few of those these days.

Moyers has been the subject of many on-line tributes in the past few days, including this one by the excellent historian Jonathan Alter.

Godspeed, Mr. Moyers….

What I’m Reading: “Rebbe”

I’ve read a lot of biographies in my time. Some of my favorites have been about great monarchs (Catherine the Great by Robert Massie), presidents (Truman by David McCoullough), scientists (Oppenheimer by Kai Bird), architects (Frank Lloyd Wright by Meryl Secrest). Now, I can finally add religious leaders to my list. Or at least one religious leader, the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

It’s taken me this long, I think, because while I am fascinated by the study of various religions, I am not very interested in the life-story of most religious leaders. This is, in part, a consequence of the vexed historicity of such figures. Usually, they lived in the distant past, shrouded in veils of myth, with the actual, living person being lost to time. But this is not the case with Rebbe Schneerson. After all, he was not only a very recent figure, having passed away in 1994, but he spent most of his life right here in the United States—Brooklyn, in fact, that modern locus of Hasidic Judaism, and especially the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty, which Schneerson led since 1951, succeeding his father-in-law.

As Joseph Telushkin recounts in his excellent book, Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History, Schneerson was essentially appointed to the position by general acclimation, bypassing the previous Rebbe’s son who had been the heir apparent. Community leaders and other rabbis in the movement were simply awed by Schneerson’s considerable intellect—he spoke half-a-dozen languages, had an Engineering degree, and was considered a “genius” in Talmudic study from the age of seventeen—and pressured him to take the job.

Which, thankfully, he did. I never thought I would ever read a book about an orthodox Jewish rabbi and, at the end, think to myself: “Wow, he seems like a really cool guy.” After all, I’m used to being utterly repulsed by most “leaders” in my own religious sphere, Christianity, with the exception of the current Pope and his immediate predecessor. But the more I read about Schneerson, the more impressed I was, not only by his general wisdom in matters of religion and morality, but also in his endless, practical concern for the well-being of ordinary (often poor) people, both Jews and Gentiles.

One example Telushkin provides involves Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress. Racist creeps in the House refused to appoint her to any high-level committees and instead stuck her on the Agriculture Committee, which, considering Chisholm represented a section of New York, seemed absurd to most observers. Yet, the snub also presented an opportunity that she, herself, never suspected. As Telushkin writes:

She soon received a phone call from the office of one of her constituents. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe would like to meet with you.” Representative Chisholm came to 770. The Rebbe said, “I know you’re very upset.” Chisholm acknowledged both being upset and feeling insulted. “What should I do?” The Rebbe said: “What a blessing God has given you. This country has so much surplus food and there are so many hungry people and you can use this gift that God’s given you to feed hungry people. Find a creative way to do it.”

And she did, creating one of the first federal food-aid programs in the history of the United States, in which surplus food was bought by the government from American farmers and distributed to poor people, thus helping the recipients, the farmers, and pretty much everyone else.

On a more personal level, Schneerson always emphasized the importance of kindness and compassion over religious stricture. In one of his drashas (sermons), he famously told the story of how his predecessor, the Alter-Rebbe, once stopped in the middle of his Sabbath observations to attend to a young woman who had just given birth and who had been left alone by her family so that they could attend synagogue. Telushkin writes:

That day, the Alter Rebbe, having somehow learned that the new mother was alone, was suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that the woman required someone to attend to her needs immediately; it might well be a matter of life and death. And since no one else was taking care of her, he concluded that he should be the one to do so.

This story apparently shocked his followers in way that most modern, secular people like myself cannot really appreciate. The idea that a rabbi might 1.) forsake the Sabbath observations in order to 2.) do menial work on the Sabbath like chopping wood and 3.) do so for an ordinary woman was radical in the extreme.

Such was Schneerson’s boundless respect and love for ordinary people that he was always concerned about inadvertently embarrassing or insulting anyone, especially those who were most vulnerable. Decades before the so-called woke movement (a bad name for a very noble cause), Schneerson refused to use the word “handicapped” in reference to battle-maimed Israeli soldiers. Telushkin writes:

Referring to the fact that such people are designated in Israel as nechei Tzahal, “handicapped of the Israel Defense Forces,” the Rebbe addressed the men as follows: “If a person has been deprived of a limb or a faculty, this itself indicates that G-d has also given him special powers to overcome the limitations this entails, and to surpass [in other areas] the achievements of ordinary people. You are not disabled or handicapped, but special and unique as you possess potentials that the rest of us do not. I therefore suggest”—the Rebbe then interspersed with a smile—“of course it is none of my business, but Jews are famous for voicing opinions on matters that do not concern them—that you should no longer be referred to as ‘disabled veterans’ but as ‘exceptional veterans’ [metzuyanim], which more aptly describes what is unique about you.

In addition to being a genuinely good and wise person, Schneerson also seemed to have what can only be described as superpowers. He worked eighteen hours a day, six-days-a-week, for most of his life. Being busy with his primary duties during the day, he met with people seeking advice in the evenings, often as late one or two o’clock in the morning. Some of the people seeking advice including future and former Prime Ministers of Isreal such as Menachem Begin, as well as many other powerful and influential figures. But, more of than not, they were comprised of ordinary men and women in his congregation. I was especially impressed with Telushkin’s story of a young woman, Chana Scharfstein, who often came to his office seeking academic as well as personal (dating) advice:

The Rebbe clearly knew his agenda for this meeting, and the conversation quickly turned in a personal direction. At a certain point, he asked Sharfstein if she felt ready to get married. Sharfstein told him that she had begun dating—in Chasidic circles, young men and women date only for the purpose of marriage—and the Rebbe asked her about a specific young man. She recalls being taken aback and thinking to herself, That’s interesting that he should ask about somebody that I had met. Sharfstein told the Rebbe that she had met the young man he mentioned, that he was clearly a fine person, but not for her. The Rebbe said all right, and then mentioned another name, and again it was someone to whom Sharfstein had been introduced. Here, too, the young man was very nice but not for her. Then the Rebbe mentioned a third name, and a fourth, “and I became really uncomfortable then. How did the Rebbe choose all the names of young men (bachurim) that I had met? I was just absolutely overwhelmed that he should mention people that I had actually met.” Only later did she learn that prior to going out with a girl, each bachur in Chabad would write to the Rebbe to inquire if the girl seemed suitable for him, and so the Rebbe, who obviously had responded in each case that Chana Zuber was suitable, had a very precise idea of all the people with whom she had gone out. But even taking all this into account, Sharfstein still remained staggered at the Rebbe’s recall. After all, he “was [already] a world leader at this time, and to keep track of each person and who had been dating whom, it’s really mind-boggling.”

As this story relates, Schneerson’s remarkable memory and formidable intelligence were often sources of awe among those in congregation. Another example involves a young student, Irving Block, who came to discuss philosophy with the Rebbe:

At the time, Block, who was studying for an MA in philosophy, was immersed in the study of the great Greek thinkers, Plato in particular. And that’s the direction in which the Rebbe led the discussion. Only Block didn’t realize at first to whom the Rebbe was referring, because it was a man named Platon about whom the Rebbe started talking. It finally struck him that Platon is how the name of the Greek philosopher is written in Greek, though in English his name is always pronounced as Plato. It’s not that the n is silent in English; it isn’t written at all. This was Block’s first surprise of the day. The man seated in front of him, dressed in the garb of a Rebbe, obviously knew about Plato, or Platon, from the original Greek and pronounced his name as it was supposed to be pronounced.

Block was not only amazed by the Rebbe’s deep understanding of the “Platon’s” philosophy but by his utter rejection of it. (Plato believed that the nuclear family was an evil institution and should be abolished, an idea that was in direct contradiction to all humanist values, including those of Judaism.)

In recounting such stories as these, Telushkin’s book is really more of an appreciation or tribute than an in-depth biography. And yet he manages to relate the primary facts of Schneerson’s remarkable life with grace. Born in Imperial Russia, Schneerson moved with his family to the US in the spring of 1941. Thereafter, he served as Rebbe for over 50 years, finally passing away in a time when the world was much changed.

One might say that he was born in the time of Tsars and passed away in the time of the internet. And, in all that time, one thing remained constant: his steadfast commitment to the practical well-being of all the people, rich and poor, high and low, in his community and around the world. Truly a person worth reading about. Check it out…

R.I.P. Harris Yulin

American cinema and theater has lost another great character actor this week, Harris Yulin. With his lumpy face and gruff demeanor, Yulin was an everyman—one of those actors that you recognize from countless roles but whose name you never knew.

He was one of the most respected stage, film, and TV actors in the country. And yet, ironically, most viewers today will know his work from two unlikely sources: the TV show Frasier on which he played an affable crime boss and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, for which Yulin appeared in one famous episode, Duet. It was this particular gig (yes, a frickin episode of Star Trek) that gave Yulin one of his few chances to really show-off his acting chops to a mass audience. I still think he should have gotten an Emmy nomination for it, but oh, well.

In all his performances, Yulin was one of those actors who exude a kind of intelligence, presence and grace that make them stand out a mile on the screen or stage.

The world is a little less interesting today without him in it.

Godspeed, Mr Yulin.

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Sherlock Holmes and George Eliot

It’s time for another entry in my ongoing series Synchronicity for Bookworms. In this episode, I will describe the incredibly tenuous and yet undeniable connection I found between the great stage and film actor Jeremy Brett and George Eliot’s classic Victorian novel Middlemarch.

As you might recall, I recently did a blog post on Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic mystery novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In that post, I mentioned that my favorite actor to ever play the role of Sherlock Holmes was Jeremy Brett. While I was writing the post, I browsed various Internet pages pertaining to Brett. Brett was primarily a brilliant and prolific stage actor, appearing in everything from Shakespearean Tragedy (check out his performance as Macbeth on YouTube) to comic theater.

On one page, I found a photo of Brett standing in front of a billboard advertising a play in which he was appearing. As I looked closer at the image, I saw that Rex Harrison was also in the play. (As I later discovered, the production was a revival of Frederick Lonsdale’s “Aren’t We All?” that ran on Broadway in 1985.) This revelation made me smile because I am also a fan of Rex Harrison, ever since I read a biography of him a decade ago.

Naturally, I immediately went to the Wikipedia page for Rex Harrison and browsed through his biography. This included his great filmography. One of the more famous films he starred in was Blithe Spirit, a supernatural comedy based on a play by Noël Coward. I clicked on the link to the Wikipedia page for Blythe Spirit (the play) and discovered that Coward took the title from a poem by the great British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Naturally, I then clicked on the link to Shelly’s Wikipedia page and browse through his biography. Reaching the bottom of the page, I saw to my amazement that George Eliott had based the character of Will Ladislaw from her great novel Middlemarch on Shelley.

And there you have it, a cosmic filament connecting two of my recent topics—Sherlock Holmes and George Eliot. When my eyes settled on this last reference to Middlemarch, a little spark of amazement ran down my spine. That’s the sensation one gets when stumbling upon the sublime, hiding in the common-place.

Note that this was not some Six Degrees of Seven Bacon thing. That is, I was not looking for any connection. In fact, Middlemarch wasn’t on my mind at all when I started Googling Jeremy Brett. And yet, there the connection was.

I don’t know if it means anything or not. But it made my day.

Edgar Awards De-Brief

Well, the 2025 Edgar Awards Ceremony is over. I didn’t win my category (that honor went to Henry Wise for his excellent novel Holy City, but I still had a blast. I met a lot of cool people, including my new editor at Crooked Lane, Sara Henry, CLB founder Matt Martz, and others. Best of all, I made some new friends in writers Kerri Hakoda, Audree Lee, and Carol Floriani.

And, for a bonus, Cathy and I got to spend some time in the greatest city in the world, Manhattan. (I am writing this post from inside a Starbucks on 7th Ave.) I used to come here pretty often in the early 2000s, when I was working for software consulting company on Prince Street, and I always loved it. I was last here for fun in 2017 with my son Connor, doing the tourist thing. The city hasn’t changed that much as far as I can tell. It’s still a rambling, teeming, kinetic barrage of sights, sounds, and languages. Manhattan is one of the few places on earth where you can step into a crowded elevator and hear Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hausa, and several others being spoken.

It’s also got the best museum in the world, the Met, which Cathy and I visited, of course. We got to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit, with Sargent’s masterpiece Portrait of Madame X on prominent display. I first learned about this amazing picture (and the scandal it caused) from David McCollough’s excellent history The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, in which Sargent is one of the Paris-bound artists discussed. (Sargent painted Madame X in Paris with a well-known socialite as his subject; hence the scandal.)

So, all in all, a damn fine trip so far. I don’t know if I will ever get another Edgar nom, but if I do, you can bet I will be back.

R.I.P. Val Kilmer

Once again, it has taken me far too long to write a short tribute to a fine person who has passed away—Val Kilmer, who died of pneumonia on April 1. This time, it was more than just my workload that explains the delay. I had a bit of trouble discovering what I wanted to say about Kilmer, who was a great actor but also a bit of a cipher. A few years ago, I read his memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, and I enjoyed it. I was struck, however, by how little Valmer says about his filmmaking experiences. For instance, he barely mentions the production of Tombstone, the film in which Kilmer had his most celebrated film performance—playing the famous gunfighter Doc Holliday—and from which the book’s title is taken. He says even less about the making of Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Kilmer portrays a talented but slightly crazy master-burglar with pitch-perfect ferocity.

This lack of detail was especially disappointing, to me, in part because Heat has my favorite action-sequence of all time—the shoot-out in Century City. More than any other actor in the scene, it’s Kilmer who makes it work, with his fluid transition from cool and controlled bank-robber to machine-gun wielding warrior. I read an autobiography written by a Navy Seal who wrote that he and his comrades once watched Heat together and were impressed by Kilmer’s magazine-changing speed in the film. High praise, indeed.

This reticence on Kilmer’s part to discuss his film-making career—the very aspect of his life that made him famous across the world—suggests to me that Kilmer was deeply ambivalent about being a movie star. I suspect that, like the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, Kilmer was simply too intelligent to think that movie-making was a worthy and serious endeavor. I also suspect that, like Burton, Kilmer was much happier as a stage actor. (His one-man show of Mark Twain was universally praised.)

Unfortunately, his ambivalence somehow bled into his performances whenever he played a leading man, as he did in several major films, none of which was terribly successful. He never seemed to really have his heart in it. But that self-doubt evaporated when he played supporting roles, and these are what he will be remembered for: Iceman in the Top Gun films; Doc Holliday in Tombstone; Chris in Heat. In each of the movies, Kilmer seemed to bring his entire soul to the performance, and he was every inch the movie star.

Godspeed, Mr. Kilmer…