Two days ago, as of this writing, I learned of the passing of actor Tom Skerritt from natural causes at age 93. One of the unspoken side effects of aging is that you live long enough to see so many of your favorites depart. While I never met Skerritt personally at any of the conventions and events I’ve attended over the decades, his presence in entertainment was a constant in my life, from childhood on. With that in mind, this column will not be some rote listing of the actor’s many roles in TV and film (there’s IMDb for that), but rather a personal recollection of my favorite roles of his and why…

One of my earliest memories of Tom Skerritt came around 1974, at the age of 7 or 8, when my monster-obsessed self watched one of my favorite (short-lived) shows; “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (1974). The episode was “The Devil’s Platform,” where Skerritt played a slick, fast-rising senatorial candidate who rises from obscurity by selling his soul to Satan, giving Palmer the power to change into a deadly Rottweiler at will to (literally) attack any obstacles to his ambition. The only obstacle Palmer can’t stop is tenacious, ghoul-chasing Chicago reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin). Even though this wasn’t one of the series’ usual “X-Files”-inspiring monster episodes, Skerritt gives Palmer a magnetic, yet ice-cold persona that made an impression on me, even as a kid too young to grasp politics. In fact, I recently rewatched this episode about two weeks ago, and it felt oddly prescient, given the current toxic state of American politics, which are far more evil and ominous than any ghouls or monsters seen in the show.

Roughly a year or after that episode of “Kolchak…,” my parents took my siblings and I to see a wholesome movie suitable for the entire family; the 1975 devil-worshipping flick, “The Devil’s Rain,” which featured Skerritt, William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Joan Prather and Ida Lupino. Once again tangled up in satanic shenanigans, Skerritt plays heroic parapsychology researcher Tom Preston (easy enough to remember the character’s first name), who heads to a small, seemingly deserted ghost town with his wife (Prather) in search of his missing brother (Shatner) and mother (Lupino), who’ve been absorbed into a local cult led by a man named Corbis (Borgnine)–a reincarnated Satanist with a direct line to Ol’ Scratch himself.

Corbis has his sights set on the Preston lineage, one of whom betrayed Corbis’ ancestor during the deadly witch-hunts of late 17th century Colonial America. Skerritt does his best to ground the material with an understated approach; unlike Shatner and Borgnine, who spend much of the movie locked in a scenery-chewing contest. The movie’s somewhat lengthy ‘wrath of God’ climax sees the entire cult washed away in the titular storm, which reduces the eyeless, black-robed satanists into puddles of liquidated crayons. I still give this one a watch occasionally when I’m in the mood for wonderfully cheesy horror entertainment.

After an appendectomy left me hospitalized for a few days in my teens (post-op infection), I watched one of the few TV stations that came in clearly on my hospital room’s small, black & white TV. To my good fortune, that station broadcast reruns of the TV series “M*A*S*H” (1972-1983); a comedy-drama set in an American Army field hospital during the Korean War (1950-1953). My sudden craving for all things related to this previously overlooked series led to my family taking in a revival screening of the 1970 original movie in the early 1980s. Director Robert Altman’s film was superficially similar to its spinoff series, though a lot darker, both in tone and style. There were no canned laugh-tracks. These earlier interpretations of familiar characters Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland), Trapper John (Elliott Gould), Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Major “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) were much more subtle.

There was also another surgeon in the 4077th field hospital who wasn’t in the TV series (but was in Richard Hooker’s semi-nonfiction novel). Captain Duke Forrest (Skerritt) was a good ol’ boy surgeon who shared a tent with yankees Hawkeye and Trapper. Skerritt gets one of the movie’s best lines when Duke complains to the (sort of) commanding officer Henry Blake (Roger Bowen) about the incompetence of Frank Burns; “Every time a patient croaks on him, he says it’s ‘god’s will,’ or somebody else’s fault.” And despite Duke’s claim of being turned off by ‘regular Army’ head nurse Major Houlihan, he eventually gets horizontal with Hot Lips after her married lover Frank is carted off in a straightjacket. A few years after seeing the movie, I took part in a far tamer community theater production of “M*A*S*H,” where I would meet a future best friend of mine, who’s been in my life through thick and thin for over 40 years now. While I don’t watch the movie or TV series as often as I used to, M*A*S*H yielded wonderful things in my life, and I still cherish my DVDs.

I didn’t see Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror masterpiece “ALIEN” (1979) in its original release, though I have strong memories of perusing bookstores and leafing through copies of the large, softback ‘photo-novel’ of the movie. I also read articles about the film in the pages of Starlog magazine. In the mid-1980s, shortly before the release of the sequel, “ALIENS” (1986), I finally saw a heavily censored broadcast of “ALIEN” on TV, which immediately prompted me to rent the uncut version on laserdisc, and eventually buy the movie in multiple formats (currently I own the Blu-Ray set of the first four movies). In the film, expectations are smartly subverted from the traditional ‘monster-on-a-spaceship’ story (see: “Queen of Blood,” “Planet of the Vampires”). One of those subverted expectations involved Tom Skerritt’s Captain Dallas; a laidback ‘space trucker’ commanding a massive refinery towing ship Nostromo, operated by a crew of seven. The even-keeled, quietly heroic Dallas, who’d normally be the hero of such a movie, is (seemingly) killed off by the intruding alien not long after the halfway mark of the film.

An alternate cut of “ALIEN” sees a moaning Dallas pleading for death from an alien cocoon aboard the Nostromo in one of the movie’s final scenes. He’s then obligingly put out of his misery by Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). In both versions, only Ripley survives the film. This was something new for sci-fi movies at that time. Contrasting with his frank, headstrong third officer Ripley, Dallas was a quiet, Mozart-enjoying skipper who epitomized that phrase from my own days in retail management; “I work to live–I don’t live to work.” Dallas was the only character equally loved by his shipmates, save for the calculating android Ash, who sees the crew as expendable means toward capturing a live alien. Much like his ‘brother’ William Shatner from “The Devil’s Rain,” Skerritt’s most recognizable role was in playing a spaceship captain…

While I have no great love for 1986’s “Top Gun,” the movie did feature some spectacular miniature dogfights intercut with then state-of-the-art aerial cinematography. At age 20 or so, I bought the movie on laserdisc based on reputation alone (sight unseen), and quickly regretted it. “Top Gun” seemed to fall more and more apart each time I tried to rationalize my purchase of it. Beyond the dogfights, I hated nearly everything about it; from its jingoistic ‘might-makes-right’ Reagan-era politics to the bizarre coupling of Tom Cruise (Pete “Maverick” Mitchell) and Kelly McGillis (Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood), who have the chemistry of a prepubescent boy sexually harassing his bored babysitter. Nevertheless, I found Tom Skerritt’s Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf to be one of the movie’s few graces. Skerritt’s completely believable as a US Navy pilot and Vietnam veteran. Nearly four decades later, on the advice of a trusted friend, I would grudgingly rent the sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” in 2022, and it was everything the first movie wasn’t. In fact, I enjoyed the sequel so much that I attended a romantic screening of it last summer with my wife at a 97-year old movie theater on Catalina Island. The only thing missing from the sequel, of course, was the presence of Tom Skerritt.

I saved perhaps my most personal favorite movie of Skerritt’s for last; as self-aggrandizing, chauvinistic presidential science advisor character named David Drumlin in the Robert Zemeckis-directed adaptation of the late Carl Sagan’s novel, “Contact” (1997). It’s not that the role was revolutionary nor particular inspiring. In fact, Drumlin spends a good chunk of the movie sabotaging the career of brilliant SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) researcher Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), even after she discovers an unmistakably intelligent alien message from deep space. What made this movie so special for me were the circumstances. “Contact” was the movie my then-future wife and I saw on our very first date together in August of 1997. By then, I’d already read Sagan’s 1985 book (a high school graduation gift) and I’d seen the movie in its opening week, but this was special.

And in regards to Skerritt’s considerable acting skills, he once again brings his seemingly effortless brand of understated realism to the role of Drumlin, playing him as a real-life adversary. As played by Skerritt, Drumlin isn’t some cartoonish caricature. He’s a flesh-and-blood stumbling block in the way of Ellie’s ascendency, calculatingly using her atheism against her to steal her rightful place aboard the alien machine; an interstellar transport built using detailed instructions from the signal she discovered. David Drumlin is that boss who did their best to keep you in your place by never giving you that well-earned raise. However, after Drumlin is killed from an explosion caused by a suicidal zealot, we don’t feel any sort of schadenfreude. Instead, Drumlin’s death gives a space shuttle Challenger-tragedy level of horror. It takes a skilled actor to elicit sympathy when playing a smug bastard.

Right now, my sympathies are with the family, friends and loved ones of this marvelous actor, whose work graced some of my favorite movies and TV shows for over 50 years. Thanks for the memories, Tom. You’ll be missed.

Tom Skerritt

August 25th, 1993 — October 21st, 2026.