Tom Skerritt, the actor who gave Alien its captain and Top Gun its chief instructor, has died, and the obituaries already agree on the word for him: authority. The sheriff, the commander, the father at the head of the table. The label is accurate, and it misses what made him matter to cinema rather than to casting offices. The best filmmakers he worked with hired that authority to take it apart.

That is the thread worth pulling through a career that ran from the New Hollywood to a late leading role. Skerritt chose directors more than parts, and he treated every set as a lesson in a craft he had first wanted to practise from the other side of the camera.

The captain Alien could not keep

Start with the billing. On Ridley Scott’s Alien, Variety notes, Skerritt was billed first, ahead of Sigourney Weaver. He played Dallas, captain of the Nostromo: the officer the crew answers to, and the doomed one. The name at the top of the poster belongs to a man the story does not let survive.

He almost said no. He had turned the part down, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both report, when the project had a small budget and no director, fearing the money would vanish into special effects. A filmmaker changed his mind. Told that Scott had signed on, he asked to see The Duellists, Scott’s first feature, and came out calling it a masterpiece. “So I had to do Alien at that point,” he recalled in the documentary Alien Evolution. An actor who joins a monster movie because of a director’s first film is already thinking like a director.

Altman’s rebel, Tony Scott’s instructor

The same instinct runs back to the start. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H made his name with Duke Forrest, one of the insubordinate but excellent army surgeons: authority’s opposite, played by an actor Hollywood would spend decades casting as officers. Skerritt credited Altman with teaching him “that you could do no wrong, as long as you tried,” and that an actor has to be “willing to make an ass out of yourself. Bob gave me that.” He went back to Altman for Thieves Like Us, and did Hal Ashby a favour on Harold and Maude as a motorcycle cop, credited under the joke name Martin Bormann.

Tony Scott then made him Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf, chief instructor at the Miramar school where Tom Cruise‘s Maverick trains. Authority again, but authority as teaching, which may be the role that suited him best. Robert Redford cast him as the Presbyterian minister and father in A River Runs Through It, a part Variety’s review said he played by discreetly revealing “the loving core inside the reedy exterior.” Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point brought him the National Board of Review’s supporting actor award, and David Cronenberg made him the sheriff of The Dead Zone.

Picket Fences and the Emmy

Television made the persona official. On David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences he was Jimmy Brock, sheriff of the fictional town of Rome, Wisconsin, “the voice of calm amid insanity,” in The Hollywood Reporter’s phrase. The role won him the Emmy for outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 1993, with a second nomination the following year. He described himself better than any obituary, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997 that a writer had once called him “a character actor locked in a leading man’s body,” and that he had always loved the line.

The actor who wanted to direct

Born Thomas Roy Skerritt in Detroit on August 25, 1933, he served in the Air Force, studied English at Wayne State University and transferred to UCLA intending to write or direct, acting partly to get past his shyness. When the low-budget Korean War drama War Hunt hired him in 1962, he told Film Comment, he saw it as “a great way to learn how to be a director.” That instinct ended in Seattle, where he helped launch TheFilmSchool and co-founded the Red Badge Project, which helps veterans work through PTSD by writing about what they lived through. In 2021 it also brought him a rare leading role in a feature, East of the Mountains, as a retired heart surgeon and widower who learns he has terminal cancer.

Skerritt died on Wednesday of natural causes, his publicist confirmed to Variety, and his family announced the death in a statement. “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,” they said. He was 93. He is survived by his wife, Julie Tokashiki, his children Andy, Erin, Matt, Collin and Emiko, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The Alien credits still put his name above Sigourney Weaver’s. Ridley Scott built a film in which top billing guarantees nothing, and Skerritt signed for the director, not the billing.