Tom Skerritt, who has died at 93 of what his family discreetly called natural causes, spent a lifetime proving that Hollywood’s idea of an everyman was usually a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a barbershop after a long discussion about trout fishing and the weather. He was the sort of actor who made competence look glamorous and glamour look faintly unnecessary.
Born in Detroit in 1933, Skerritt did the decent American thing of joining the Air Force before anyone thought of casting him as a pilot. He then drifted into acting the way other men drift into real estate: almost by accident, and with rather better results. Robert Altman spotted him for M*A*S*H*, where he played Duke Forrest with the air of a man who had already seen the joke and decided not to spoil it for everyone else. A decade later Ridley Scott put him in charge of the Nostromo in Alien. As Captain Dallas he demonstrated that the only rational response to a chest-bursting xenomorph is a quiet professionalism that never quite survives the second act. Audiences remembered the creature; professionals remembered Skerritt’s calm.
He was Viper in Top Gun, the instructor who made Tom Cruise look like a talented intern. He was the quietly suffering husband in Steel Magnolias, the philosophical father in A River Runs Through It, and, for four seasons of Picket Fences, the small-town sheriff who treated moral complexity as if it were a parking ticket that still had to be written out. An Emmy followed, which he accepted with the mild surprise of a man who had never expected the post office to notice him.
Skerritt never chased stardom with the desperation of those who fear obscurity more than death. He simply kept turning up, looking reliable, and leaving the scenery slightly better arranged than he found it. In later years he taught storytelling to veterans and worried about rivers, activities that suggested a man who had decided the real drama was happening off-camera.
He is survived by his wife Julie, five children, and the lingering suspicion that most leading men are merely elaborately trained versions of Tom Skerritt. Hollywood will replace him with someone younger, better lit, and less interesting. The rest of us will simply miss the quiet authority of a man who never needed to raise his voice to be heard.