Thomas Roy "Tom" SkerrittMovies | A Familiar Face | Seattle Times Newspaper (born August 25, 1933) is an Emmy Award-winning American actor who has appeared in over 40 films and more than 200 television episodes since 1962.

Biography

Career

Skerritt made his television debut in 1962 in Combat! and his film debut in War Hunt, produced by Terry Sanders and released the same year. Skerritt's notable film appearances include M*A*S*H (1970; his huge role was pared down enormously by director Robert Altman), Harold and Maude (credited as "M. Borman") (1971), Big Bad Mama, Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke (1978), Ice Castles (1978), as Captain A.J. Dallas of the commercial towing vessel 'Nostromo' in Alien (1979), as a would-be astronaut in Contact (1997) and SpaceCamp (1986), and in Top Gun (1986), where he played opposite Tom Cruise as CDR Mike "Viper" Metcalf aka The Man.

He was the Rev. MacLean in A River Runs Through It (1992). He was in the movie Poison Ivy (1992) with Drew Barrymore and also played a sheriff in The Dead Zone, a movie based on a Stephen King novel. In television he was in an episode of Hawaii Five-0 as a cop whose wife was murdered. He also appeared as Evan Drake in the television sitcom Cheers, played a judge on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and starred in the television series Picket Fences (1992–1996) in the role of Sheriff Jimmy Brock, for which he won his Emmy. More recently, Skerritt has starred in Homeland Security and The Grid which is a Fox/BBC co-production. Both of these latter projects dealt with counter-terrorism.