Tom Skerritt

Thomas Roy Skerritt was born in Detroit on August 25, 1933, the youngest of three children of Helen, a homemaker, and Roy Skerritt, a businessman. He graduated from Mackenzie High School in 1951 and enlisted in the United States Air Force that same year, spending most of a four-year tour as a classifications specialist at Bergstrom Field in Austin, Texas.

After his service he studied at Henry Ford College and Wayne State University, then went west to UCLA, meaning to major in English and drifting toward directing. A production of The Rainmaker got him noticed; he left without a degree, and in 1962 made his film debut in War Hunt.

Through the 1960s he worked without pause in television — Combat!, The Virginian, Gunsmoke, Death Valley Days, where he once played a young Mark Twain. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) made him a film actor to reckon with, and over the next two decades he became one of Hollywood’s steadiest presences: the husband in The Turning Point, the captain of the Nostromo in Alien, Viper in Top Gun, Drum in Steel Magnolias, the fly-fishing minister in A River Runs Through It.

As Sheriff Jimmy Brock in Picket Fences (1992–1996) he won the 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He never stopped working: he made his Broadway debut at eighty in A Time to Kill, carried East of the Mountains as a dying surgeon in his late eighties, and appeared in more than 170 film and television productions across six decades.

Seattle was home. There he co-founded The Film School with screenwriter Stuart Stern, co-developed the Red Badge Project to help veterans tell their own stories, and with his wife, Julie Tokashiki, built a channel for Pacific Northwest filmmakers. He died at his home there on October 21, 2026, at the age of 93.