Tom Skerritt, the American actor who commanded the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s Alien, died on Wednesday 21 October, aged 93. His publicist confirmed the news to CBS News, and his family said he died of natural causes. “While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career,” they said, “we knew him for his humor, curiosity, wisdom, generosity, and the love he brought into our lives.”
Most of today’s obituaries lead with Top Gun, in which he played Viper, the instructor with the moustache and the patience of a saint, or with A River Runs Through It and the Emmy-winning small-town strangeness of Picket Fences. All fair enough. But for anyone who reads this magazine, Skerritt will always be Captain Arthur Dallas, the man in the baseball cap who drew the short straw, the flamethrower and the air ducts.
It is easy to forget, after nearly half a century of Ripley being the most famous heroine in science fiction, that Alien was not sold to audiences as her film. Skerritt took top billing. Dallas had the rank, the calm, the square jaw and the reassuring weariness of a working skipper who just wants to get the ore home and collect his bonus. Every instinct in a 1979 cinema audience said he was the hero. Then he climbed into the ventilation shafts to flush out the creature, Lambert’s voice rising in his headset as the blip on the motion tracker closed in, and he did not climb out again. The film tilted on its axis and handed itself to Sigourney Weaver, and it worked precisely because Skerritt had played the decoy so convincingly. You cannot pull the rug out from under an audience unless somebody has made them comfortable standing on it.
Fans of the 2003 Director’s Cut will also remember the restored cocoon scene, in which Ripley finds Dallas still alive in the creature’s nest, being slowly turned into something else, and he asks her to kill him. It was cut from the 1979 release for pace, and it is one of the bleakest few seconds in the whole franchise. Skerritt went back to the role one last time in 2014, voicing Dallas for the “Crew Expendable” add-on to the video game Alien: Isolation, alongside several of his old crewmates.
His genre CV ran wider than one doomed captain. Born in Detroit on 25 August 1933, he spent the 1960s and early 1970s in television guest spots and Robert Altman pictures (he was Duke in the film of M*A*S*H) before Scott cast him. In David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983) he was Sheriff George Bannerman, the decent lawman who asks Christopher Walken’s reluctant psychic to help catch the Castle Rock killer, which in a Stephen King story is never a good career move. He was the uncle in Poltergeist III (1988), stuck in a Chicago skyscraper with Carol Anne and a great many haunted mirrors. In Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997) he was David Drumlin, the smooth presidential science adviser who sneers at Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway, then pinches her credit and her seat in the Machine. He made a self-serving careerist perfectly plausible, which was rather the point. (Mark R. Leeper’s review of Contact is still in our archive.)
What linked those roles was a quality the trade obituaries are calling “everyman”, though “trustworthy” might be closer. Skerritt played men you would follow down a corridor, and genre film-makers knew exactly what to do with that: make you follow him, then shut the hatch.
There is also a sobering roll call here. Of the seven-strong crew of the Nostromo, John Hurt and Harry Dean Stanton died in 2017, Ian Holm in 2020 and Yaphet Kotto in 2021. With Skerritt gone, only Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright remain. In space, as the poster told us, no one can hear you scream. Down here, a good many of us will be raising a glass to the captain instead.
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