Tom Skerritt, Alien's Captain Dallas and Top Gun's Viper, Dies at 93

Tom Skerritt, the actor who played Captain Dallas in Alien and Viper in Top Gun, has died at 93. A representative said he died of natural causes on Wednesday.

Skerritt built a five-decade career on a specific screen presence: the mustache, the jaw, the crinkly eyes, and what obituarists keep calling a rugged, cool authoritarian bearing. He made that bearing work across three recurring role types — commanding officers, dads and cops.

Which roles defined him?

The list is longer than most viewers remember:

• Captain Dallas in Alien (1979)
• Viper in Top Gun
• An enlistee in the original MASH* movie — one of the few characters who did not transition to the television series
• A Vietnam veteran in the Cheech and Chong stoner classic Up in Smoke
• Small-town sheriffs in the film The Dead Zone and the TV series Picket Fences
• A father in Ice Castles, Steel Magnolias and A River Runs Through It

The sheriff work paid off. Skerritt won an Emmy in 1993 for Picket Fences.

He also took on quieter late-career parts, grappling with his own death in the film East of the Mountains, a role he discussed in movie interviews.

Where did he come from?

Skerritt described himself as a blue-collar kid from Detroit. He served in the Air Force before attending UCLA and turning to theater. His early Hollywood days consisted of television guest spots — from My Three Sons to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour — and time spent with Robert Redford and director Hal Ashby. Ashby cast him in Harold and Maude, as a cop, of course.

What does his death change for the record?

Off screen, Skerritt promoted independent film and theater in the Pacific Northwest, where he lived. He co-founded The Red Badge Project, a program that lets veterans take storytelling courses and share their experiences — a project that outlasted his screen credits in personal significance, and one that continues without its founder.

The representative's statement gives the cause as natural causes and nothing more; no further family or memorial details have been announced. What remains is the filmography: a character actor who never carried a franchise but anchored several of the most rewatched American films of his era.