Top Gun and M*A*S*H film star Tom Skerritt dies aged 93
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Tom Skerritt, the veteran star best known for roles in Top Gun, M*A*S*H and Steel Magnolias, has died aged 93.
“Our family is deeply saddened to share that Tom Skerritt passed away on October 21, 2026, from natural causes,” his family confirmed to People.
Tom Skerritt, pictured in 2016, died of natural causes. Getty
“He was a loving husband to Julie; father to Andy, Erin, Matt, Colin, and Emiko; grandfather to Sara, Maddison, Sunny, Louisa, and Georgia; and great-grandfather to Marigold and Ravi. We are heartbroken by his loss.
“While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career, we knew him for his humour, curiosity, wisdom, generosity, and the love he brought into our lives,” they said.
The family said information about a memorial for the Emmy winner would be shared at a later date.
Skerritt’s acting career began after he left the United States Air Force in 1955.
Using an education assistance program, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was discovered during a production of The Rainmaker.
He left school to pursue acting and landed his debut film role in the 1962 film War Hunt alongside Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford.
He was later mentored by director Robert Altman, who cast Skerritt in his breakout role as surgeon Duke Forrest in his 1970 film M*A*S*H.
Skerritt went on to earn more than 170 acting credits, with some of his best-known roles being alongside Sigourney Weaver in Alien and as Tom Cruise’s chief instructor, Mike “Viper” Metcalf, in the original Top Gun.
In 2019, he said making Alien was “one of the most memorable things” of his lengthy career.
“I recognised we were making something extraordinary,” he told The A.V. Club.
He also had roles in Steel Magnolias, Big Bad Mama, Cheers and Poltergeist III.
Skerritt played Julia Roberts’ dad in Steel Magnolias. Tri-Star Pictures
Skerritt in Top Gun. Paramount Pictures
In the ’90s, he won an Emmy Award for lead actor for leading family drama Picket Fences and reunited with Redford, who directed him in the Oscar-winning film A River Runs Through It.
Skerritt’s final role was alongside Wyatt Russell and Dennis Quaid in the 2025 western Broke.
In 2020, he told We Are The Mighty he felt “a great sense of gratitude and appreciation and good fortune” for his career.
“I don’t think many people in the business I am in have not had that overreaching of two or three decades of extraordinary projects,” he said.
The actor was born on August 23, 1933 in Detroit and joined the air force after graduating from high school.
Skerritt in Robert Altman’s 1970’s M*A*S*H film. 20th Century Fox
“There were four or five of us who were having a few beers one night – we must have been 17, just got out of high school – we didn’t know what we were going to do; we were not ready to go to college,” Skerritt told Film Comment in 2016.
“We just had a couple of beers and thought, ’We want to travel, we don’t have any money, and we want to get away from here.” And we enlisted the following day, four of us, I think, enlisted at the same time. It was a four-year term.”
Outside of acting, Skerritt and his wife, Julie Tokashiki, founded production company Triple Squirrels in 2020.
He also co-founded the Red Badge Project in 2012 to help veterans heal from the effects of PTSD through storytelling.
In 2022, Skerritt received the International Press Academy’s honorary Mary Pickford Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to the Entertainment Industry.
