Tom Skerritt, Emmy-winning actor with roles in Picket Fences, Alien and Top Gun, dies at 93

Tom Skerritt, the Emmy-winning actor who embodied a solid, wry authority figure, whether as a flight instructor in Top Gun, a tough-but-fair sheriff on TV’s Picket Fences or the doomed captain of Alien, has died. He was 93.

Skerritt died Wednesday of natural causes, his family said in a statement. “While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career, we knew him for his humour, curiosity, wisdom, generosity and the love he brought into our lives. He cared deeply about imagination, creativity, storytelling, service, veterans, the natural world and helping others find and share their own voices,” the statement said.

Skerritt was twice nominated for an Emmy – both for Picket Fences, winning outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 1993. Other career highlights include playing the patient husband of Shirley MacLaine in Turning Point, Sally Field’s husband in Steel Magnolias and a scheming opportunist who stands in the way of Jodie Foster’s attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life in Contact.

“A writer once described me as a character actor locked in a leading man’s body, and I’ve always loved that. It’s a nice compliment. I’ve been able to walk the line between television and features,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997.

Onstage, he was the narrator in Our Town at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre in 2004 and made his Broadway debut in 2013 in an adaptation of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, in which The Associated Press wrote he “nicely pulls off a charming disgraced and drunken lawyer.”

Skerritt’s early life

Skerritt grew up in a middle-class Detroit family, his father a small businessman and his mother a housewife. He had two brothers; a sister died as a child.

He spent four years in the Air Force, attended Wayne State University and then switched to the University of California, Los Angeles, to study filmmaking, inspired by a viewing of Citizen Kane.

His performance in a Los Angeles theater production of The Rainmaker led to his first film role – a supporting role as a sergeant in the 1962 scrappy independent Korean War film War Hunt. The movie marked the debuts of Skerritt, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola.

Redford and Skerritt were vying for the same lead role, with the former winning out. Years later, Redford, now directing, paid Skerritt back with compound interest in A River Runs Through It, handing him the plum role of the stern Rev. John Maclean, a minister whose governing passions are his faith and fly-fishing. The New York Times was impressed by his “halting, thoughtful manner.”

Redford, who died last year, became a lifelong friend. “There was such a deep connection we made with each other that it matured into a level-headed friendship,” Redford told the Seattle Times in 2007. “His values were close to mine, and he kept his integrity.”

Alien and Top Gun

After War Hunt, however, Skerritt still struggled for screen time, landing a small role in M.A.S.H. and Thieves Like Us for Robert Altman, and doing a bit part as a motorcycle cop in Harold and Maude for Hal Ashby.

Things changed with The Turning Point, which earned him a National Board of Review win. Then came Alien, with Skerritt playing the beleaguered and doomed captain of the ship Nostromo, crouched in a dark, claustrophobic duct, hunting the alien with a sputtering flamethrower. He told the Seattle Times that what appealed to him in the script was that the lead actor disappeared and “the woman becomes the hero. I really like that idea.”

Things shifted again after that, including a memorable role as Tom Cruise’s instructor in the landmark Top Gun: “Gentlemen, you are the top 1 per cent of all Naval aviators. The elite. The best of the best. We’ll make you better,” he told the students. “This school is about combat. There are no points for second place.”

Skerritt achieved perhaps his best notices as the kindly sheriff in Picket Fences, a comedy created by David E. Kelley that won 14 Emmy Awards – one for Skerritt – and a Golden Globe over its four-year run from 1992 to 1996.

Skerritt co-starred opposite Kathy Baker, playing his doctor wife in the community of Rome, Wisc., a place with bizarre happenings, like having a robber leaving a trail of frogs or the pope becoming the primary witness to a murder.

“It was written by the best writer on television,” he told the A.V. Club in 2019. “That was the magic and brilliance of it. Because I wasn’t trying to do a series, but then they said Kathy Baker was going to do it, and I thought, ‘She’s fabulous – what do they want me for?’ ”

Also on the small screen, Skerritt played William Walker on ABC’s Brothers and Sisters, Jimmy Ford on TNT’s Leverage and he had the recurring character Evan Drake on Cheers. He starred in the Hallmark movie What the Deaf Man Heard, co-starring Matthew Modine, Judith Ivey and James Earl Jones. He also modelled for Guess jeans.

Directing and writing – his initial dream – had been overtaken by a career in front of the camera, though he managed to direct and star in the 1997 television movie Divided by Hate.

“Things happen,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 1992. “You get hired for a film and the roles kept coming for me. I kept telling myself that if I stuck with acting it would be a really good training for what the problems are in directing. Then the family came along and I had to support them. The years flew by and there was a time when I said I would give up acting and really try to get into directing. But it hasn’t worked out that way and I have no regrets.”

He is survived by his third wife, Julie Tokashiki, and five children.