Tom Skerritt Spent 14 Years Teaching Veterans to Tell Their Stories. The Obituaries Led With Viper
His family's statement listed his passions ahead of his 170 credits — storytelling, veterans, the natural world. Here is the second career the obituaries buried.
Tom Skerritt died of natural causes on Wednesday, October 21, at 93. His family announced the news Thursday through his publicist, Susan Madore.
The statement ran through the formalities (heartbroken, grateful for the support, privacy while they grieve) and then it got specific. “He cared deeply about imagination, creativity, storytelling, service, veterans, the natural world and helping others find and share their own voices,” it read. That list is not how the obituaries are filing him. They are leading, every one of them, with Dallas and Viper and the sheriff. Fair enough. They’re all true.
The veterans came first, and they came early. In 2012 Skerritt co-founded the Red Badge Project with Army Captain Evan Bailey, a storytelling-workshop program for veterans living with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Skerritt had enlisted in the Air Force after high school and served four years himself, before college and everything after. The project partners with the Federal Way Vet Center, whose team leader, Amy V Morris, described the premise on the project’s site: “When we forged our partnership with the Red Badge Project (RBP), it was with exactly this idea in mind: to offer another type of therapeutic venue to help trauma survivors heal and gain strength in their ‘broken places.'” Fourteen years on, the workshops are still running. They kept running without him in the room. An Army veteran who took the course in 2014, identified only as M.S. on the project’s site, put the mechanism in plainer terms: “My stories and poems have helped release some of that stress and tension that I carry with me as a veteran with PTSD. … I find the characters in my stories help express those raw emotions better than I ever could.”
Seattle was the other front. Skerritt co-founded TheFilmSchool there in the early 2000s with Stewart Stern, the Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter, and the acting teacher Warren Etheredge, to train writers and directors outside Los Angeles. He later founded Heyou Media, a Seattle digital outlet, and in 2020 the film company Triple Squirrels with his wife, Julie Tokashiki. At Henry Ford College he summed up that entire side of his life in one line: “Story has been the only thing that makes sense in this business.”
And the rivers.
Filming A River Runs Through It in the early nineties turned him into a conservationist, and he stayed one, working with American Rivers, the Gallatin River Task Force and the Wildlands Festival, and making Reflections of the River, a documentary series on the health of America’s waterways. Decades of it. He’d told Fox News Digital the same thing about the veterans’ writing that his family’s statement said about him: “There’s wonderful therapy about being able to write a story, whether it’s true or whether it’s recovering from some very bad moments that they had.”
None of that interrupted the acting. The screen years run from War Hunt in 1962 to Broke, the rodeo drama released in June 2025. Sixty-three years, more than 170 credits. He was 88 when East of the Mountains handed him his first film lead, a retired surgeon driving into the Cascades with a terminal diagnosis; he also executive-produced it, and the performance brought a Satellite Award nomination and the International Press Academy’s honorary Mary Pickford Award in 2022. He was 91 when Broke came out. Top Gun was back in cinemas in May 2026 for its 40th anniversary — “Generation after generation have come to love that film and watch it with the same enthusiasm as the past ones,” he’d told USA Today at the 30th. He turned 93 in August.
Duke Forrest, the surgeon stealing jeeps in Altman’s MAS*H. Dallas, the Nostromo’s captain in Alien. Mike “Viper” Metcalf, the instructor in Top Gun. Sheriff Jimmy Brock, four seasons of Picket Fences, the role that won him the Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actor in 1993.
He is survived by his wife, Julie Tokashiki, five children — Andy, Erin, Matt, Colin and Emiko — five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Marigold and Ravi. Details of a memorial will be shared at a later date, the family said.
