Tom Skerritt
Tom Skerritt is an actor, born 1933.
Skerritt was already a working actor when American movies changed under him. He had been doing television since 1962, an episode of Combat! here and a genre picture there, when Robert Altman cast him as Duke Forrest in M*A*S*H in 1970, and the New Hollywood decade gave him a steady living that has now run past 170 film and television productions.
What he does better than almost anyone is play competence that turns out to be insufficient. His characters carry rank. Dallas in Alien is the captain, and the first hour of that film runs on the audience's assumption that a captain can fix this. Viper in Top Gun is the instructor who already flew the war the kids are pretending to fight. Sheriff Bannerman in The Dead Zone, Drumlin in Contact, Rev. Maclean in A River Runs Through It: men with a title, a jaw and a limit.
He is funnier than his casting suggests, too. The twitchy veteran Strawberry in Up in Smoke and the motorcycle cop in Harold and Maude are both played completely straight, which is the joke.
The Emmy came from television, where he spent the 1990s as small-town sheriff Jimmy Brock on Picket Fences and got the sustained lead role that film never quite handed him. He is still working in his nineties, mostly in small parts that lean on the face, and the face has earned it.
Movies (48)
- Alien (1979)
- Ted (2012)
- Top Gun (1986)
- Tears of the Sun (2003)
- Contact (1997)
- M*A*S*H (1970)
- A River Runs Through It (1992)
- Broke (2025)
- Steel Magnolias (1989)
- Poison Ivy (1992)
- The Dead Zone (1983)
- Poltergeist III (1988)
- Up in Smoke (1978)
- Whiteout (2009)
- Harold and Maude (1971)
- The Parent Trap II (1986)
- The Rookie (1990)
- The Big Town (1987)
- Singles (1992)
- A Hologram for the King (2016)
- The Other Sister (1999)
- Texas Rangers (2001)
- Fallen (2006)
- Desperation (2006)
- Ice Castles (1978)
- Knight Moves (1992)
- Mammoth (2006)
- The Devil’s Rain (1975)
- SpaceCamp (1986)
- War Hunt (1962)
TV (14)
Where to start with Tom Skerritt
Start with Alien. It is the best use anyone ever made of him: top billing, natural authority, and a director happy to let you settle into the idea that this man is in charge of the situation. Understand that performance and the rest of his casting explains itself.
Then Top Gun for the same qualities played warmly, and M*A*S*H for the loose, mean, improvised version of him that Altman got and nobody else did. A River Runs Through It is the one to watch if you want him quiet, a Presbyterian father teaching two sons to cast a line and failing to teach them anything else. The Dead Zone and Contact are worth an evening together for how differently he plays a decent official and a compromised one. If you want him relaxed, Lucky gives him a barroom monologue in his eighties and asks for nothing else.