(25 August 1933 – 21 October 2026)
The American actor and director Tom Skerritt had a long career in cinema and television, appearing in some 170 films. He was a very good actor but somehow seldom achieved the status of a star. After his long career he has died of natural causes at the age of 93. It is not as if he didn’t appear in popular and very successful films such as M*A*S*H, Top Gun, Harold and Maude, Thieves Like Us, The Turning Point, Alien, The Dead Zone, The Rookie and A River Runs Through It, but it may have been the fickleness of public taste that prevented Skerritt from becoming a star player. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of the businessman Roy Skerritt and his wife Helen. He graduated from Mackenzie High School in Detroit and immediately enlisted in the US Air Force, after which he attended Henry Ford College and Wayne State University and subsequently the University of California in Los Angeles. He developed an interest in acting and directing, eventually leaving UCLA without a degree to become a professional actor.
His first film was War Hunt in 1962, Terry Sanders’ Korean War drama with a cast that included John Saxon, Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack. After a couple of other movies Robert Altman cast Skerritt in M*A*S*H as Captain Duke Forrest, a member of a mobile surgical team, in his satirical comedy also set in the Korean war, with a cast including Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman and Robert Duvall. It was an enormous hit and led to a popular television series. Skerritt then appeared in Blake Edwards’ Western Wild Rovers with William Holden and Ryan O’Neal and in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, about a romance between a young man and a 79-year-old old woman (Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon), in which Skerritt played a motorcycle officer billed jokily as M. Borman. He continued to work steadily, in Altman’s Thieves Like Us, Roger Corman’s Big Bad Mama, Robert Fuest’s supernatural horror film The Devil’s Rain, with William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino and John Travolta, and Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point starring Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft, with Skerritt as erstwhile dancer Wayne, husband of MacLaine’s former ballerina DeeDee Rodgers.
In 1979, because Ridley Scott was directing, Skerritt agreed to do Alien, playing Dallas, Captain of the spaceship Nostromo that lands on an exomoon, only to find it occupied by aliens. With Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto and Skerritt, Alien was a great success, winning an Oscar for best visual effects and several Bafta awards. Among other films that he made were David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, with Christopher Walken and Brooke Adams, Tony Scott’s Top Gun with Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis and Val Kilmer and Poltergeist III, in which Skerritt starred opposite Nancy Allen. He also co-starred in Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolias with Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts and Olympia Dukakis. Clint Eastwood directed him in The Rookie, and Robert Redford helmed him in A River Runs Through It with Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt and Brenda Blethyn, while he appeared opposite his Alien co-star Harry Dean Stanton in John Carroll Lynch’s mesmerizing Lucky (2016). Skerritt carried on making films until his last, Broke, in 2025, a Western with Wyatt Russell, Dennis Quaid and Mary McDonnell.
He was also prolific on television from 1962 in Combat! until 1967, and played several roles in The Virginian from 1962 to 1971, while he had the starring part of Sheriff Jimmy Brock in Picket Fences for 87 episodes, for which he won an Emmy in 1993 as outstanding lead actor. He was married to Charlotte Shanks from 1957 to 1972 and they had three children, Andy, Dan and Erin. From 1977 to 1992 he was married to Sue Oran with whom he had a son, Colin, and in 1998 he married Julie Tokashiki and they had a daughter, Emi.
MICHAEL DARVELL
