Tom Skerritt, the 'Top Gun' Instructor and 'Alien' Captain, Dies at 93

He won a 1993 Emmy as the small-town sheriff on CBS's 'Picket Fences,' and his family said he died of natural causes.

Tom Skerritt, who drilled Tom Cruise's class of Navy pilots in "Top Gun" and captained the Nostromo in "Alien," died Wednesday at 93, his family said.

He died of natural causes, according to a family statement quoted in the Associated Press obituary that LAist published Thursday. His family said the world knew him through his acting, but they knew him for his "humor, curiosity, wisdom, generosity and the love he brought into our lives." His survivors include Julie Tokashiki, his third wife, and his five children.

People went looking for him in large numbers. According to pageview figures Wikimedia publishes, his English Wikipedia page drew 406,636 views on Friday, the most of any article on the site that day. On that same list, the page for "Picket Fences" got more readers than the pages for "Alien" and "Top Gun."

The Emmy came from that show. The Television Academy's awards database lists two nominations for Skerritt, both for playing Sheriff Jimmy Brock on CBS's "Picket Fences," and one win, the 1993 Emmy for lead actor in a drama. He was nominated again the next year. The David E. Kelley series ran from 1992 to 1996 and was set in Rome, Wisconsin, a town odd enough that, the AP noted, a robber once left a trail of frogs.

In "Alien," his name comes first. 20th Century Studios' page for the 1979 film lists Skerritt at the top of the cast, ahead of Sigourney Weaver. He played the Nostromo's captain, who goes into a cramped, dark duct with a sputtering flamethrower to hunt the creature. He told the Seattle Times, the AP reported, that the script hooked him because its leading man disappears and "the woman becomes the hero. I really like that idea."

"Top Gun" came seven years later. Paramount's page for the 1986 film names him among its five featured cast members, as Cmdr. Mike Metcalf, the instructor at the Navy fighter weapons school where Cruise's Maverick trains.

Before Hollywood, the Detroit native served four years in the Air Force. He later left Wayne State University for UCLA to study filmmaking, a choice he made after seeing "Citizen Kane." A Los Angeles stage production of "The Rainmaker" got him his first movie, "War Hunt," a $250,000 Korean War picture from 1962 that also featured a young Robert Redford.

Skerritt and Redford had both wanted the lead in it, and Redford got the part. Decades later, as a director, Redford cast him as the Rev. John Maclean, the stern, fly-fishing minister in "A River Runs Through It." Skerritt told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997, the AP reported, that a writer once called him "a character actor locked in a leading man's body," and that he'd always loved the description.

Directing had been his first plan. He did get to direct some, including the 1997 TV movie "Divided by Hate," which he also starred in. Five years before that, he told the Ottawa Citizen that the roles had kept coming, then he'd had a family to support, and the switch to directing hadn't happened. "I have no regrets," he said.

Source: LAist, retrieved October 24, 2026. Other sources: wikimedia.org, televisionacademy.com, 20thcenturystudios.com, Paramount.