RIP, Val Kilmer: Revisiting "How Young is So Young to Die?"
Plus: some of my favorite movies from youth
RIP, Val Kilmer, one of my first movie crushes:
NY Times, Bruce Weber: Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65
Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.
The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered, she said.
…..
But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Mr. Kilmer’s career had developed. Mr. Scott cast him in his first big-budget film, “Top Gun” (1986), the testosterone-fueled adventure drama about Navy fighter pilots in training, in which Mr. Kilmer played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of Mr. Kilmer’s other prominent appearances as a co-star or a member of a starry ensemble. (He reprised it in a brief cameo in the film’s 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” also starring Mr. Cruise.)
Mr. Kilmer played the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western, alongside Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp. He was part of a robbery gang in “Heat” (1995), a contemporary urban “High Noon”-ish tale that was a vehicle for Robert De Niro as the mastermind of a heist and Al Pacino as the cop who chases him down.
….
He applied to the Juilliard School in New York and at 17 became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting program there. At Juilliard, he and several classmates wrote and performed “How It All Began,” adapted from the autobiography of the West German urban guerrilla Michael Baumann. In 1981, after Mr. Kilmer graduated, he appeared in a professional production of the play at the Public Theater.
….
Like his fellow actor Hal Holbrook, Mr. Kilmer had a longstanding fascination with Mark Twain, and he spent many years researching and writing a one-man play, “Citizen Twain,” which he began performing around the country in 2010. (Mr. Kilmer, who had trouble managing his weight, gave his interest in Twain credit for helping him slim down at last.)
….
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, Mr. Kilmer spoke about his absence from mainstream Hollywood for a decade or more and acknowledged that his career arc had been unusual. He had other interests, he said; he wanted to hang out with his kids.
“I don’t have any regrets,” he said. He added: “It’s an adage but it’s kind of true: Once you’re a star, you’re always a star; it’s just what level?”
What’s interesting to me in this NY Times obit is they didn’t feature his starring role that inspired my crush: Real Genius.
It was a huge favorite at my nerd school (as well as the many nerd programs I was in), and in the 1980s I was a kid, obviously.
My favorite in adulthood was Tombstone:
He a lot of great lines in that one.
As Doc Holliday, spends so much of the movie as a sweaty reprobate, ultimately dying of tuberculosis at the grand old age of 36:
In 1887, prematurely gray and badly ailing, Holliday made his way to the Hotel Glenwood, near the hot springs of Glenwood Springs, Colorado.[67] He hoped to take advantage of the reputed curative power of the waters, but the sulfurous fumes from the spring might have done his lungs more harm than good.[9]: 217 As he lay dying, Holliday is reported to have asked the nurse attending him for a shot of whiskey. When she told him no, he looked at his bootless feet, amused. The nurses said that his last words were, "This is funny."[8] He always figured he would be killed someday with his boots on.[2]: 372 Holliday died at 10 a.m. on November 8, 1887. He was 36.
He had originally been diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was in his early 20s. His mother had died of TB when he was 15.
In the 19th century, it was fairly common for people to die of tuberculosis at all ages, especially if they had a lifestyle that might undermine their health. The pain from the difficulty in breathing led Holliday to use laudanum (opium in alcohol) and alcohol to deaden the pain… which didn’t lengthen his life, that’s for sure.
Many famous people died of TB at relatively young ages.
Revisit: How Young is So Young to Die?
This brings me back to an old post:
March 2017: Mortality Monday: How Young is "So Young to Die"?
Recently there were a couple of notable deaths, with different reactions.
Bill Paxton died at age 61, and many said “how young”.
But back when Sir Walter Scott died of typhus at age 61, I don’t think many were saying “how young”. (Heh, Scott wrote a book called Tales of Old Mortality).
Similarly, Judge Wapner died recently, at age 97. Most people I know remarked “I didn’t realize he was so old” or “I didn’t realize he was still alive!”
But maybe 150+ years from now people will be exclaiming “How young!” when some notable celebrity dies at age 97.
So…. how can we figure out how young is too young?
I think we all can agree that 97 years old is still pretty old (and maybe I’ll revisit the old side of the question in a different post when Mel Brooks or a similarly old celeb dies).
But is 65, the age at which Val Kilmer died, a young age to die?
How would we judge that?
Back in the 19th century, they would think 65 was a grand old age to reach. Almost near the three score and ten years considered the full age for a man (that is, 70 years old.)
But they had lots of infectious diseases with not necessarily great public sanitation (if one lived in an urban setting), no effective treatments, with most of the treatments around being such that you’d be lucky if they didn’t kill you.
For non-infectious disease, there weren’t much in the way of surgical interventions that would work. Cancer treatments and heart disease interventions were not very helpful.
In any case, what one would do to check how young is “so young to die” is to check the percentile at which the person died for their particular birth cohort.
That is, for the people who were born the year they were born, what percentage of the people had died by that age?
So let’s check!
Social Security Cohort Life Tables: Actuals and Projected
The most recent available sets of Social Security Cohort Life Tables are available here: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/HistEst/CohLifeTables/2024/CohLifeTables2024.html
Some technical notes:
The following downloadable files provide historical and projected cohort life tables by single year of age, sex, and calendar year for years 1900 through 2100. A cohort life table represents the mortality experience in a series of years, based on an individual’s year of birth and the year in which the individual will reach each succeeding age. Actuarial Study Number 120 provides additional information about this and other mortality concepts. Section IV, which begins on page 3 of that study, contains definitions of life table functions, and also contains a brief discussion of life tables in general. Additionally, definitions specifically related to the columns used in these life tables, can be found here. The interest rate used for calculating the annuity-related values shown in the life tables is the same as the ultimate real interest rate used for the intermediate assumptions.
To give you a simple version:
These are developed with actual data and projections from cohorts with a variety of assumptions
They are sex-distinct tables, because there is a large sex gap in mortality
We can use Val Kilmer’s actual birth year to use as an estimate of his death percentile for his cohort
So let me do the simple estimate first.
Val Kilmer was born December 31, 1959. Hmmm, that’s almost as good as 1960.. but I’ll come back to that.
First, using 1959:
You can see there are multiple items across this table, but to keep it simple, I will use the l(x) column, which starts out at 100,000 at age 0 (birth) and represents a theoretical number of people alive at the beginning of each period.
So about 75.855% alive when turning age 65… and 74.634% alive when turning age 66 (which Kilmer didn’t reach).
I could do a linear interpolation of exact dates, yadda yadda, but there are already assumptions built into this table. Let’s make life easy for ourselves and say 75% when he died, so he was at the 25th percentile death age for American men.
That’s pretty young for dying.
If I had picked the 1960 cohort:
It would have gone from 76.1% alive at age exactly 65 to 74.9%, and that would have made me use a lower percentile than the 25th percentile as my estimate.
Still, I would say 25th percentile is pretty low.
What is the 50th percentile?
Now, you may be wondering, what’s the 50th percentile (aka the median) for this group - American males born in the year 1959.
That would be the age at which l(x) = 50,000.
It would be between ages 80 and 81.
More mortality basics
And if you wonder what the relationship between this number and life expectancy is (And the most common age at death, which is an entirely different thing), check this out:
Mortality Basics with Meep: Median, Mode, and Mean Age at Death and Life Expectancy
I am writing this in response to something incredibly stupid.
But wait! That’s calendar year mortality! (Just to mess with you more) Not cohort mortality!
2019: Mortality with Meep: Cohort vs. Period Mortality Tables
To make it very simple: if you’re planning your retirement, you should use cohort mortality, not period (or calendar year) mortality.
The mortality rates of people 20+ years older than you may not tell you much about what your own mortality expectations will be 20 years from now.
Just as Doc Holliday dying of TB at the age of 36 has little to do with Val Kilmer dying of pneumonia at age 65 (his throat cancer treatment probably had a lot to do with that.)