Tom Skerritt, Emmy-winning Picket Fences star, dies at 93

Tom Skerritt, who played the flight instructor Viper in Top Gun, the doomed captain of the Nostromo in Alien and Sheriff Jimmy Brock on Picket Fences, died on October 21 of natural causes at the age of 93.

His family confirmed the death in a statement issued to news organizations including Fox News Digital and ABC News. Skerritt is survived by his wife, Julie Tokashiki, five children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He had worked in film and television for more than six decades.

He won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1993 for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, for his work on Picket Fences, one of two Emmy nominations in his career, both of them for that CBS series.

What the family said

The family said Skerritt would be remembered for the characters he played and for his belief that stories can help people heal and create change. His talent, integrity, curiosity and compassion left a mark on his profession and on the communities he worked to support, the family said in a tribute published by ABC News.

The family thanked his friends, colleagues and fans for their support and asked for privacy, saying information about a memorial would be shared at a later date. Funeral plans were not immediately available, the Associated Press reported.

While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career, we knew him for his humor, 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.

Skerritt made his film debut in 1962 in the war drama War Hunt, a low-budget film he made during his time at UCLA, with Robert Redford in the cast.

The Associated Press singled out his turns as the patient husband of Shirley MacLaine's character in The Turning Point and as Sally Field's husband in Steel Magnolias. In Contact he played a scheming opportunist who stands in the way of Jodie Foster's attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. His Steel Magnolias character was Drum Eatenton, in the 1989 comedy-drama that also starred Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton, ABC News reported.

Detroit, the Air Force, then UCLA

Thomas Roy Skerritt was born on Aug. 25, 1933, in Detroit. He enlisted in the Air Force straight out of high school and served as a classification specialist; he never flew.

The Associated Press reported that he attended Henry Ford College, Wayne State University and the University of California, Los Angeles, after the service, and that he left school to pursue acting. Deadline said he gravitated first toward directing, and that his earliest screen work came in arcs on television westerns, among them The Virginian, Death Valley Days, 12 O'Clock High and Gunsmoke.

Skerritt's first large film role came in Robert Altman's 1970 comedy M*A*S*H, as Captain Augustus Bedford 'Duke' Forrest, a Southern surgeon who bunked with Hawkeye, Frank Burns and Trapper John. Neither he nor the character appeared in the long-running television spinoff. He later told the Associated Press that he expected it to be another sitcom.

Deadline listed Harold and Maude, The Turning Point, Up in Smoke and Ice Castles among the films he appeared in through the 1970s, a decade in which he also worked with Altman again, on Thieves Like Us in 1974, playing Dee Mobley. His other films after M*A*S*H included Wild Rovers in 1971, Fuzz in 1972 and Big Bad Mama in 1974.

Half a point on Alien

In 1979 Skerritt played Captain Dallas, commander of the doomed ship Nostromo, in Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, then a relatively new British director, and starring Sigourney Weaver. He did not think much of the script or of the part when he first read it, according to Deadline. He reprised the character for the 2014 video game Alien: Isolation.

By the end of the shoot he had offered to trade his salary for half a percentage point of the film, and the executive producer, Ron Shusett, laughed.

In 1986 Skerritt played Cmdr. Mike 'Viper' Metcalf in Top Gun, a father figure to Tom Cruise's Maverick who tells him the truth about his own father's death; the conversation convinces a downcast Maverick to stay in the program.

Television ran alongside the films throughout. He had a recurring role in the sixth season of Cheers as Evan Drake, a corporate boss on whom Rebecca, played by Kirstie Alley, has a crush, and he turned up over the years on The F.B.I., Mannix, Lancer and Hawaii 5-0.

A Redford reunion in Montana

Robert Redford, Skerritt's co-star in War Hunt in 1962, directed him in A River Runs Through It, the 1992 adaptation of Norman Maclean's novella about two sons of a Presbyterian minister coming of age in Depression-era Montana. Skerritt played the minister, Rev. John Maclean, and his sons were played by Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt, Deadline reported. The film was nominated for three Oscars and won for best cinematography.

Skerritt's breakout lead role on television came the same year, on Picket Fences, the David E. Kelley drama set in Rome, Wisconsin, a small town prone to odd occurrences that Sheriff Jimmy Brock had to investigate. The series ran four seasons on CBS and collected 14 Emmys. He later worked mostly in single-episode stints, on The West Wing, Will & Grace, The Good Wife and Madam Secretary among them.

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.

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. The Associated Press wrote that he "nicely pulls off a charming disgraced and drunken lawyer."

TheFilmSchool and the Red Badge Project

Skerritt helped found TheFilmSchool in Seattle, an effort his family said was meant to support the next generation of filmmakers and storytellers.

He also co-founded the Red Badge Project, which helps military veterans work through post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression by writing about their experiences and sharing them. His family said he believed deeply in the power of storytelling.

Away from the industry, Skerritt helped create and champion Reflections of the River, a documentary series about the health of America's rivers and the importance of protecting them, an effort Fox News Digital reported was inspired in part by his experience filming A River Runs Through It. He also supported river conservation through partnerships with the Wildlands Festival, American Rivers and the Gallatin River Task Force.

Reflecting on how much work had come his way, Skerritt once said he felt "a great sense of gratitude and appreciation and good fortune" for the number of projects he had been part of.