Tom Skerritt spent six decades being the man everyone else in the story trusted to be in charge. He was the senior surgeon holding a combat hospital together in Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H.” He was the commanding officer calling the shots on a doomed deep-space hauler in “Alien.” He was the legendary flight instructor Tom Cruise’s Maverick was still trying to impress in “Top Gun.” All three men had seen real combat. Skerritt’s own service record never left Texas.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Skerritt enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1951, straight out of Mackenzie High School in Detroit, and served four years as a classifications specialist — sorting enlisted airmen into assignments, not flying missions — mostly stationed at Bergstrom Field outside Austin, according to Wikipedia. The Korean War was underway for most of that stretch. He never saw it. He left the Air Force, drifted through Henry Ford College, Wayne State, and UCLA, and eventually dropped out of school for acting instead.
The role that made him, Duke Forrest in Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” cast him as one of the two freewheeling Army surgeons at the center of the film — a war Skerritt had been of age for and had missed. Nine years later he was Captain Dallas, the ill-fated commander of the Nostromo in “Alien.” Seven years after that, in “Top Gun” (1986), he played Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf, head of the Navy’s TOPGUN school and, per the film’s own backstory, a Vietnam-era MiG killer — the kind of pilot’s pilot Maverick spent the whole movie trying to live up to.
Television gave him his only competitive acting award: the 1993 Emmy for lead actor in a drama series, as small-town Sheriff Jimmy Brock on “Picket Fences,” a role that also earned him two Golden Globe nominations across the show’s 1992-1996 run. He picked up a National Board of Review Award for “The Turning Point” (1977), and rounded out a nearly 180-credit filmography with “Steel Magnolias” (1989), “A River Runs Through It” (1992), and a recurring guest arc on “Cheers.”
He didn’t stop being surprising once the big roles dried up. In 2012, at 79, he danced the title role in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Don Quixote.” He founded a Seattle digital media company, Heyou Media. He voiced the gunslinger Clay Allison in the 2005 video game “Gun.” And in 2017 he reunited on screen with his “Alien” co-star Harry Dean Stanton for “Lucky” — Stanton’s final film.
Skerritt died at his home in Seattle on October 21, 2026. He was 93; his family said the cause was natural causes, as CBS News and NPR reported. He is survived by his third wife, Julie Tokashiki, and five children across three marriages — Charlotte Shanks, Sue Oran, and Tokashiki. “While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career,” his family said, “we knew him for his humor, curiosity, wisdom, generosity, and the love he brought into our lives,” according to Deadline. For six decades, the world knew him as the man in charge. His own record says he never had to be.