KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 23 — Tom Skerritt, the Emmy-winning US actor who spent a lifetime playing steady, wry figures of authority in films such as Top Gun and Alien, has died at 93.

Skerritt died last Wednesday of natural causes, news wire France 24 reported today, citing a statement from his family.

“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,” the statement said.

The family added that he cared deeply about storytelling, service, veterans, the natural world and helping others find their own voices.

Skerritt grew up in a middle-class Detroit household, the son of a small businessman and a housewife, with two brothers.

After four years in the US Air Force and a stint at Wayne State University, he switched to the University of California, Los Angeles, to study filmmaking, inspired by a viewing of Citizen Kane.

Acting found him first, when his performance in a Los Angeles stage production of The Rainmaker led to his debut as a sergeant in the 1962 Korean War film War Hunt.

The independent picture also marked the debuts of Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola.

Skerritt and Redford had gone after the same lead role, and Redford won it.

Years later, with Redford now directing, he handed Skerritt the plum part of the stern, fly-fishing minister Reverend John Maclean in A River Runs Through It.

Redford, who died last year, became a lifelong friend, saying in 2007 that Skerritt’s values were close to his own and that he “kept his integrity”.

Stardom, however, took its time, and Skerritt spent years in small parts, including roles in M.A.S.H. and Thieves Like Us for Robert Altman and a bit part as a motorcycle cop in Harold and Maude.

Things began to change with The Turning Point, in which he played Shirley MacLaine’s patient husband and earned a National Board of Review win.

Then came Alien in 1979, in which he played the beleaguered captain of the Nostromo, crouched in a dark duct and hunting the creature with a sputtering flamethrower.

He later told the Seattle Times that what drew him to the script was that the lead actor disappeared and a woman became the hero, an idea he said he really liked.

In 1986, he became Tom Cruise’s no-nonsense flight instructor in Top Gun, delivering the line that there are “no points for second place”.

His best notices, though, may have come from television, as the kindly sheriff in Picket Fences.

Created by David E. Kelley, the comedy-drama ran from 1992 to 1996 and won 14 Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.

Skerritt took one of those Emmys in 1993 for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, one of two nominations he earned for the show.

He played opposite Kathy Baker as his doctor wife in Rome, Wisconsin, a town where a robber might leave a trail of frogs and the pope could turn up as the key witness to a murder.

He admitted he had not been looking to do a series, telling the A.V. Club in 2019 that he thought Baker was “fabulous” and wondered what they wanted him for.

Elsewhere on screen, he was Sally Field’s husband in Steel Magnolias and a scheming opportunist standing in Jodie Foster’s way in Contact.

On television, he also played William Walker in Brothers and Sisters, Jimmy Ford in Leverage and the recurring Evan Drake in Cheers, and he even modelled for Guess jeans.

Theatre called too, with Skerritt narrating Our Town at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre in 2004 and making his Broadway debut in 2013 in an adaptation of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill.

A writer once described him as a character actor locked in a leading man’s body, a label he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997 that he had always loved.

Directing had been his first dream, and he did direct and star in the 1997 television movie Divided by Hate, though acting kept winning out.

“Things happen,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 1992, adding that the roles kept coming and that he had “no regrets”.

He is survived by his third wife, Julie Tokashiki, and five children.