Beloved Character Actor Tom Skerritt Dead at 93
Tom Skerritt, the Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning star of movies like M*A*S*H and Alien, has died. He was 93 years old.
Skerritt, whose career spanned more than six decades, was born in 1933 in Detroit, and served in the U.S. Air Force before returning home to start a show business career. Early in his career, he appeared in TV shows like My Favorite Martian, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. His film debut came in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1970’s M*A*S*H that he broke through to the mainstream.
Throughout the 1970s, Skerritt appeared in a variety of projects, including Harold & Maude, Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke, and Alien. By that point, he had become one of Hollywood’s favorite gruff character actors, often playing soldiers and other authority figures.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Skerritt appeared in The Dead Zone, Top Gun, Steel Magnolias, A River Runs Through It, and Contact, among many others. During that time, he also played Evan Drake on Cheers and won an Emmy Award for his role on Picket Fences.
More recently, Skerritt appeared in TV shows like Brothers & Sisters and Leverage, and provided the voice of Clay Allison in the 2005 video game Gun. One of his last major film roles was alongside his Alien co-star Harry Dean Stanton in 2017’s Lucky.
