Tom Skerritt died Wednesday of natural causes, according to a statement from his family. He was 93. He is survived by his wife Julie Tokashiki and five children.
He began with War Hunt in 1962, a Korean War drama that also marked the screen debuts of Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, and Francis Ford Coppola. That early connection to Redford proved lasting. From there, Skerritt worked his way through New Hollywood: supporting Robert Altman in M*A*S*H, then landing the roles that would define his image.
As Captain Dallas in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), he commanded the doomed crew of the Nostromo with the calm of someone who already understood the odds. In Top Gun (1986), he was Viper, the flight instructor watching over a young Tom Cruise. He played Sally Field's husband in Steel Magnolias, the minister father in Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, and a scheming bureaucrat in Contact. Each role was anchored in the same quality: he held the room without announcing it.
Television gave him his only Emmy. As Sheriff Jimmy Brock on David E. Kelley's Picket Fences, Skerritt won the 1993 Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series. The show collected 14 Emmys and a Golden Globe.
"We are heartbroken by his loss," his family said. "While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career, we knew him for his humor, curiosity, wisdom."
He once described himself as "a character actor locked in a leading man's body." The tension served him well for six decades.
