I Just Do Films That I Would Pay Five Bucks to See: Tom Skerritt, 1933-2026

The point of Alien was to make the characters believable, the spacefaring equivalent of blue collar workers. Truckers in space, as they say. Tom Skerritt as Dallas was the captain, a hard-working guy who kept the crew together as they did a job for a company that would grow worse with every following movie. Skerritt himself is the last of the male members of the crew, and with his death it is only Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright left.

Skerritt was born in Detroit, after which he joined the Air Force. Following his time there, he frankly drifted a bit—he attended Henry Ford College, which is a community college and therefore he might’ve gotten an AA before moving to Wayne State University, after which he went to UCLA. He didn’t graduate from UCLA. He dropped out in pursuit of an acting career. He was, it seems, discovered in a UCLA production of The Rainmaker, after which he did a lot of TV. A lot of Westerns, including an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney. But then, there were a lot of TV Westerns at the time.

After nearly a decade of things like My Favorite Martian and Mannix and Death Valley Days, Skerritt appeared as Duke Forrest in Robert Altman’s MASH. It’s not a terribly well-remembered character, not being one picked up for the TV show, but still. Altman served as a mentor to Skerritt on set, though notably not enough to keep casting him in things. (To be fair, Skerritt did appear in Thieves Like Us.) The next decade wasn’t just television; he’s the motorcycle cop who pulls Maude over in Harold and Maude. But also Bonanza and Barnaby Jones.

Then came Alien. Obviously, there was no room for him in the ongoing franchise; if you know about the franchise, you know what’s going to happen to pretty well any character in it. Don’t get attached, is my advice. However, his appearance in the film firmly launched him into character actor status. He plays one of the male, and therefore less important, characters in Steel Magnolias. He’s probably the fourth person you think of in Top Gun, though obviously I haven’t seen the movie in a while.

A lot of his work was just paying the bills. But he did do eighty-eight episodes of Picket Fences and was extremely good in Contact. He was in The Trojan Horse with Paul Gross, which I own but haven’t seen yet because I want to watch it with someone to mock it with me. What with one thing and another, he kept working. His last credited performance on IMDb was last year. He may never have hit quite the heights of some of his costars, but he was always a welcome presence.