Tom Skerritt dies aged 93: the Alien, Top Gun and Picket Fences star's career remembered

Tom Skerritt, the actor whose calm, unshowy presence anchored films from Alien to Top Gun, has died at the age of 93. His death was reported on Thursday by outlets including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, closing a screen career that ran for more than six decades and took in some of the best-loved films of the 1970s and 1980s.

Born Thomas Roy Skerritt in Detroit, Michigan, on 25 August 1933, he joined the US Air Force after leaving school in 1951 and served for four years. He went on to study at Wayne State University, where he first tried his hand at acting, and later at UCLA, before making his feature debut in the 1962 war drama War Hunt.

His breakthrough arrived in 1970 with Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, in which he played the army surgeon Duke Forrest. Later in the decade he appeared opposite Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point, and in 1979 he took the role many science fiction fans still associate with him most: Captain Dallas, the commander of the Nostromo in Ridley Scott's Alien.

The 1980s brought another career-defining part. In Top Gun he played Commander Mike "Viper" Metcalf, the steady instructor at the elite naval flying school, opposite Tom Cruise, and the film's enormous success made him a familiar face to a whole new generation. He followed it with Steel Magnolias in 1989, playing Drum Eatenton, and then with Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It in 1992, in which he was the Reverend Maclean, the quietly formidable father at the heart of the story. Jodie Foster's Contact, in which he played the scientist David Drumlin, followed in 1997.

Television gave him some of his most rewarding work. Viewers of Cheers will remember him as the businessman Evan Drake, but it was Picket Fences that brought him his greatest acclaim. As Sheriff Jimmy Brock in David E. Kelley's offbeat small-town drama, which ran from 1992 to 1996, he won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1993 and was nominated again the following year.

He found a fresh audience in 2006 with Brothers & Sisters, playing William Walker, the family patriarch whose sudden death in the opening episode set the whole saga in motion, and he returned to the role in flashbacks. Later credits included Huff, Leverage and Madam Secretary.

The circumstances of his death had not been confirmed at the time of writing, and tributes from colleagues and fans are expected to follow in the coming days.

For many he will always be Viper or Dallas, but the breadth of a career that moved from Altman to Scott and from Cheers to Picket Fences is a reminder of how often he made the films and series around him better. For more of the latest film and television news, visit SoaplandTV.