Val Kilmer, the star of “Top Gun,” talks about his health, cancer, and losing his voice

Maverick, which came out earlier this summer, Val Kilmer made a fantastic return to the big screen. Longtime fans saw the actor play his favourite antagonist role against Tom Cruise in a way that touched on Kilmer’s real fight with cancer.

Before talking about his health concerns in public, Kilmer, 62, thought about a possible throat cancer diagnosis in secret for two years, from 2015 to 2017. CNN says that at the height of his career, the actor, whose credits include Tombstone, Heat, Batman Forever, and the original Top Gun, helped the movie industry make more than $2 billion. But when Kilmer started talking about how his fight with throat cancer hurt his health and, in the end, made him unable to speak, people who liked him and people who didn’t like him didn’t know what would happen to his career.

The interview by Kilmer

In an honest interview, Kilmer told the New York Times that he didn’t want to go to the hospital at first. After he was diagnosed with throat cancer, Kilmer’s kids finally got him to the hospital for treatment, which the Times says included several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Kilmer’s 2020 documentary, Val, and his biography, I’m Your Huckleberry, and other sources say that the surgeries helped him fully recover from his throat cancer and seem to put it into remission.

Because of Kilmer’s surgeries, he now needs a tracheostomy and feeding tubes. This means that he can’t speak the way he used to. Now that it’s harder for me to talk, I want to share my story more than ever, Kilmer says in his upcoming documentary Val, which is about the actor’s career and life up until he was diagnosed with cancer and then beat it.

When it was confirmed that he had cancer:

Rumours say that Kilmer’s friend and fellow Hollywood actor Michael Douglas was the first to hear that his health was worsening. Kilmer didn’t tell anyone about his situation at first, and he has only talked about how long it will take him to get better in certain situations since then. Kilmer didn’t decide to talk about his past illness until 2017 when he did so during a Reddit chat.

At the time, Kilmer said, ____I think Michael Douglas was trying to help me since reporters were probably asking where I was and I had just gotten over cancer. Even though my tongue is slowly improving, it is still swollen. People think I might still be sick because I don’t sound like me.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter later that same year, Kilmer said that getting better from throat cancer had “taken a toll” on his health. Harvard Health publications say throat cancer usually starts in the vocal cords and then spreads to the tonsils and tongue in the back of the throat.

On his first health worry with Cher, the woman he was dating at the time:

In his autobiography, Kilmer talked about a fascinating part of how he found out he had throat cancer and how Cher helped him fight it.

Don Gates

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