Cher was turning 36 the spring they met. Val Kilmer was 22, freshly out of Juilliard, doing Shakespeare in the Park, and completely unknown. The party was for her birthday.
They became friends before anything else. “We became friends because we laughed at the same things constantly,” she told People. He started sleeping over, just as a friend. “That took a long time,” she said, then reconsidered. “Well, I guess not really a long time.”
They gave each other joke Latin names. He was Valus Maximus. She was Cherus Reprimandus. “Of course he was Maximus, come on,” she said. In public they went by Sid and Ethel, because neither of them wanted to shout the other’s famous name across a room.
“He’s like nobody I’ve ever known,” she said. “He is exasperating and hysterical. Thrilling and funny, and doesn’t do what anyone else does.”
The romance lasted about 2 years. Then Val ended it. “I was madly in love with Val Kilmer, and he left,” she told Howard Stern in 2024. He told her the roughly 13-year age gap was too much. He was one of the very few men who ever walked away from Cher instead of the other way around.
It didn’t end the friendship. He was right there beside her at the Top Gun premiere in 1986, 2 years after the romance was over. His career kept climbing after that. The Doors. Tombstone, where his Doc Holliday became, for a lot of critics, the definitive one. Heat. Batman Forever. She won the Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck and spent the next few decades as one of the biggest live draws on the planet.
In 2014 Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer, which eventually damaged the voice that had made him so magnetic. Cher gave him a guesthouse on her property to stay in while he was sick. In his 2020 memoir, “I’m Your Huckleberry,” he described waking one night vomiting blood, praying, calling 911, and then calling her. “Cher stepped in and stepped up,” he wrote.
Val Kilmer died on April 1, 2025, at 65, of pneumonia. His daughter Mercedes announced it.
The next day, Cher said goodbye using the old name. She called him funny, crazy, brilliant, brave, a great friend, and a pain in the ass. “Valus,” she wrote.
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