When Val Kilmer died, Cher did not salute him by calling him Val. He wrote one word: “Valus”. It was the nickname born more than forty years before, when they were young, in love and neither could imagine where they would bring their lives.
They met in 1982 at a birthday party.
Val was 22 years old and was still far from being the star that the audience would have known in films such as Top Gun, The Doors and Batman Forever.
Cher had 36 and was already an international celebrity.
Among them, even before love, laughter came.
They talked for hours, joked all the time and built that complicity made of names that meant only to them.
He became “Sid”, she “Ethel”.
Then came “Valus Maximus” and “Cherus Reprimandus”.
Hollywood could focus on the fourteen years of age difference.
They seemed to focus on something else.
Cher would have remembered that relationship as something deeply intense. Kilmer was unpredictable, brilliant, capable of exasperating her and at the same time making her laugh like a few others.
In 1984 their love story ended.
But something less common happened: the bond did not end.
Years passed.
Other reports, films, successes, disappointments and completely different lives arrived.
Then, about thirty years later, Val needed help.
Between 2014 and 2015 he began his difficult battle against a throat tumor. Care and interventions deeply altered his health and, above all, the voice that for decades had been one of his work tools.
At that time Cher greeted him in his home.
They were no longer a couple for many years.
It didn't matter.
Kilmer later reported a dramatic night in which he woke up vomiting blood. The situation required immediate medical assistance.
Cher was there.
Perhaps this is the detail that best tells their story.
Not the fact that two celebrities fell in love in the 1980s.
But that, when everything that makes Hollywood sparkling was now irrelevant and instead of the holidays there were illness, fear and hospitals, their affection was still present.
In his 2020 memoir, Kilmer recalled Cher as one of the most entertaining people of his life.
The time had transformed their love, without being able to erase it.
Val Kilmer died on 1 April 2025, aged 65. His daughter Mercedes said the cause was pneumonia.
Cher gave him a few words.
He remembered it as brilliant, brave, funny and incredibly stubborn.
Then that name came.
“Valus”.
For anyone else it could seem just a strange nickname.
For them it contained more than forty years of history.
Perhaps some loves are not intended to last as a couple.
They end, change shape, cross other lives and even stop needing a precise name.
But when the hardest time comes, find out if that person really left.
Cher and Val Kilmer broke up in 1984.
Forty years later, she still called him Valus.