Alien and Top Gun Star Tom Skerritt Dies Aged 93
Tom Skerritt, the veteran actor whose remarkable six decade career included one of science fiction horror’s greatest films in Ridley Scott’s Alien, has died aged 93. Skerritt died of natural causes on Wednesday, 21 October, with his family confirming the news. To horror fans he will forever be remembered as Arthur Dallas, captain of the doomed commercial towing vessel Nostromo, but his long career also took him through satanic horror, killer animals, Stephen King adaptations and the Poltergeist franchise.
Born Thomas Roy Skerritt in Detroit in 1933, Skerritt served in the United States Air Force before pursuing acting, making his film debut in the 1962 war drama War Hunt. His breakthrough arrived with Robert Altman’s MASH* in 1970, where he played Captain Augustus Bedford “Duke” Forrest alongside Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. By the end of the decade, however, he would board a spaceship with seven crewmates, a cat and quite possibly the worst additional passenger in the history of commercial freight.
Before the Nostromo, Skerritt had already ventured into horror with 1975’s The Devil’s Rain. Directed by Robert Fuest, the supernatural horror film cast him as Tom Preston opposite William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino and a young John Travolta. The story involved a Satanic cult and an ancient book containing the souls of those who had surrendered themselves to the Devil, providing Skerritt with an early encounter with supernatural evil. It may not have achieved the lasting reputation of what came next, but it means Dallas wasn’t Skerritt’s first occasion discovering that the sensible-looking man in a horror film is generally standing approximately fifteen minutes away from something appalling.
Then came Alien in 1979. Skerritt initially turned down the project when it had a smaller budget and no director attached, but reconsidered after Ridley Scott became involved. As Dallas, Skerritt received top billing in a cast that included Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright and Harry Dean Stanton. Dallas is an understated but essential part of why Alien works. He isn’t an indestructible action hero commanding a futuristic military vessel. He is the captain of a working spaceship populated by people who argue about pay, complain about company decisions and discover that responding to a mysterious transmission can have significantly worse consequences than unpaid overtime.
Dallas tries to maintain control as the Nostromo’s situation deteriorates following the discovery on LV-426 and the unforgettable birth of the creature aboard the ship. His eventual decision to enter the ventilation system armed with a flamethrower produced one of the film’s great sequences. Dallas crawls through increasingly claustrophobic ducts while the remaining crew track his movement, until the Xenomorph suddenly appears directly in front of him. In a film filled with iconic moments, Dallas disappearing into the darkness remains one of its most effective shocks.
Skerritt would eventually return to Dallas decades later, providing his voice for bonus content connected with the 2014 video game Alien: Isolation. The game painstakingly recreated the atmosphere and industrial design of Scott’s film, while members of the original cast including Skerritt, Weaver, Cartwright, Stanton and Kotto reprised their characters for additional downloadable missions. It was a fitting return to the Nostromo for an actor whose relatively brief encounter with the Xenomorph had become one of his defining screen roles.
His horror career continued immediately after Alien with Savage Harvest in 1981, an animal attack thriller in which a family in Kenya finds itself threatened by starving lions. Two years later he entered Stephen King territory in David Cronenberg’s superb The Dead Zone. Skerritt played Sheriff George Bannerman, who turns to Christopher Walken’s psychic Johnny Smith for help identifying the Castle Rock Strangler. Surrounded by Walken, Cronenberg and King’s story, Skerritt brought exactly the grounded authority the film needed while the supernatural events became increasingly disturbing around him.
In 1988 he joined another major horror franchise with Poltergeist III, playing Bruce Gardner, uncle and guardian to Heather O’Rourke’s Carol Anne. The third film relocated the supernatural battle from suburban houses to a Chicago skyscraper, where Reverend Kane continued pursuing Carol Anne through mirrors and reflections. Skerritt again occupied familiar territory as the dependable adult gradually discovering that ordinary solutions aren’t especially useful when the problem can climb out of a mirror.
He returned to Stephen King material in Mick Garris’ 2006 television adaptation Desperation, this time playing author Johnny Marinville. Based on King’s 1996 novel, the story strands travellers in a Nevada mining town controlled by a malevolent force, with Skerritt appearing alongside Ron Perlman, Steven Weber and Annabeth Gish. It gave him another substantial genre role decades after Dallas first went looking for something unpleasant in the Nostromo’s ventilation system.
Outside horror, Skerritt built an extraordinary collection of credits. He played Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf in Tony Scott’s Top Gun, providing Tom Cruise’s Maverick with an instructor whose authority came without needing to shout every sentence across an aircraft carrier. His films also included The Turning Point, Up in Smoke, Steel Magnolias, A River Runs Through It and Contact. On television, his performance as Sheriff Jimmy Brock in Picket Fences earned him the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1993.
Skerritt is survived by his wife, Julie Tokashiki, and his five children. Across more than six decades, he accumulated a body of work stretching from war films and comedy to drama, television and some wonderfully nasty horror.
For genre fans, though, there will always be Dallas, flamethrower in hand, crawling through the Nostromo’s air shafts while everyone watching knows that something terrible is waiting in the dark.
