Tom Skerritt, the steady-eyed leading man who anchored the television drama "Picket Fences" and played the doomed captain of the commercial towing vessel Nostromo in Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror classic "Alien," has died at 93, according to reports Thursday.

Skerritt's career stretched across more than half a century and moved easily between the big screen and television, though he was best known to many viewers as Sheriff Jimmy Brock, the small-town lawman at the center of David E. Kelley's offbeat CBS drama. His death removes one of the last working links to the extraordinary wave of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking that launched his career.

Born in Detroit in 1933, Skerritt studied at what is now Macomb Community College outside the Motor City before heading west. He broke into the industry in the early 1960s through guest roles on television, appearing in the era's most-watched Westerns and anthology shows. Work came steadily, and by the end of that decade he had begun carving out a niche as a sturdy, unshowy presence in features - the kind of actor directors trusted with the role of the reasonable man in an unreasonable situation.

That quality defined the role that made him a genre icon. In "Alien," released in 1979, Skerritt played Dallas, the captain of a mining ship diverted to investigate a distress signal. The performance is a study in understatement: Dallas keeps a level head and a possessive hand on his crew right up to the moment the creature and the corporation's hidden agenda strip him of control. Without Skerritt's calm center, the film's fatal claustrophobia would not land as it does. The movie became a franchise touchstone and is still cited among the finest science fiction horror pictures ever made.

He arrived on "Picket Fences" in 1992 as part of an ensemble built around his sheriff, a decent man raising a family in the fictional town of Rome, Wisconsin, while the series folded murder cases, medical stories and strange small-town behavior into the same hour. The show was a critical favorite and ran for four seasons, and the role earned Skerritt a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 1993.

None of that, though, captures the range of his film résumé. He was in Robert Altman's "MASH," the 1970 Korean War comedy that upended the war picture, at the start of the decade. He appeared in "Harold and Maude," "The Turning Point," "Up in Smoke" and later the 1986 hit "Top Gun," where - continuing a pattern of playing aviators - he took the part of the commander overseeing a young pilot's training. Offscreen he was a licensed pilot himself, a detail that fit his public image as a quietly competent man's man.

Skerritt never seemed to chase stardom. He worked so consistently that his name became a kind of guarantee of professional craft rather than marquee glamour. The 1990s saw him in "A River Runs Through It" and "Singles," and he stayed busy into the next decade.

He won his second Emmy two years before "Picket Fences," in 1991, for a guest role on the series "Cheers." He also directed and wrote on occasion, and he was a founder and longtime supporter of the Seattle International Film Festival, a commitment that reflected his adopted home in Washington state.

Leading figures in the entertainment industry remembered him as an actor's actor, a colleague whose preparation and calm set the tone on every set he joined. Tributes emphasized the breadth of his work and the plain decency of the men he often played.

Skerritt is survived by his family, including children who followed him into the performing arts. Memorial arrangements were not immediately made public.

For a younger generation of fans, the captain's chair on the bridge of the Nostromo - and the moment his hand reaches toward the air vent - will remain his signature. For others, it is a sheriff's badge in a Wisconsin town that was never quite as ordinary as it looked. They amount to the same thing: an actor who made authority feel human.

Source: Hollywood Reporter