Emmy-winning Alien and Top Gun actor Tom Skerritt dies aged 93

Tom Skerritt had roles in Alien and Top Gun (AP)

Tom Skerritt, the Emmy-winning actor who embodied a solid, wry authority figure, whether as a flight instructor in Top Gun, a tough-but-fair sheriff on TV’s Picket Fences or the doomed captain of Alien, has died aged 93.

Skerritt died on Wednesday of natural causes, his family said in a statement.

“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. He cared deeply about imagination, creativity, storytelling, service, veterans, the natural world and helping others find and share their own voices,” the statement said.

Skerritt was twice nominated for an Emmy — both for Picket Fences, winning outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 1993.

Other career highlights include playing the patient husband of Shirley MacLaine in Turning Point, Sally Field’s husband in Steel Magnolias and a scheming opportunist who stands in the way of Jodie Foster’s attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life in Contact.

“A writer once described me as a character actor locked in a leading man’s body, and I’ve always loved that. It’s a nice compliment. I’ve been able to walk the line between television and features,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997.

Onstage, he was the narrator in Our Town at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre in 2004 and made his Broadway debut in 2013 in an adaptation of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, in which the Associated Press wrote he “nicely pulls off a charming disgraced and drunken lawyer”.