5 Tom Skerritt Performances Worth Watching This Weekend

Photo: Hugo Dezurko/Pexels

When the news came through that Tom Skerritt had died at 93, my first reaction was not sadness so much as a long list of scenes playing in my head. That is the funny thing about him. Most of us never went to a film because Tom Skerritt was in it, yet he turns up in an amazing number of the films we love. His family said he died of natural causes at home in Seattle on 21 October.

If you want to spend some time with him this weekend, these are the five performances I would start with. They are not necessarily his biggest parts. They are the ones that show what he did best, which was to make everyone around him look good.

1. Alien (1979)

Start here, because it is the cleverest bit of casting in the list. Skerritt plays Dallas, captain of the Nostromo, and he got top billing. Audiences in 1979 had every reason to think he was the hero. Then the film pulls the rug away and hands the story to Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. Skerritt has said that was exactly why he took the job. Watch his scenes in the air ducts and notice how calm he keeps Dallas, right up to the moment the calm runs out.

2. Top Gun (1986)

Viper is the part people will quote at you. He is the instructor with the speech about the best of the best, and he could easily have been a cardboard authority figure. Skerritt plays him dry and quiet, a man who has nothing to prove to a room full of young pilots. That restraint is why the film's louder moments work.

3. A River Runs Through It (1992)

This is my personal favourite. Robert Redford directed it, and there is a lovely bit of history behind that. Decades earlier the two men had chased the same lead in Skerritt's first film, War Hunt, and Redford got it. Here Redford gave him one of the best roles of his career, a Montana minister who loves his sons, his faith and fly-fishing in roughly equal measure. It is a gentle, controlled performance, and the river scenes are worth the watch on their own.

4. Picket Fences (1992 to 1996)

Not a film, but you cannot leave it out. As Sheriff Jimmy Brock in David E. Kelley's odd little town of Rome, Wisconsin, Skerritt won the Emmy for lead actor in a drama in 1993. The show threw strange case after strange case at him, and he was the steady centre that stopped it from floating away. If you can find an episode or two, you will see why critics loved him in it.

5. Steel Magnolias (1989)

A smaller part, as Sally Field's husband, but it shows how comfortable he was in an ensemble. He never tries to steal a scene, and somehow that makes you notice him more.

If you have more time, M*A*S*H, The Turning Point and Contact are all worth adding. He made more than 170 film and TV appearances and was still working in his 90s, so there is no shortage of material.

He liked to describe himself as a character actor stuck in a leading man's body. After a weekend with these five, I think you will agree he had the best of both. For the full story of his life, from Detroit and the Air Force to his work with veterans in Seattle, read the Global Celebrity Meter tribute, Tom Skerritt Dies at 93.