Tom Skerritt, who starred in the TV series  Picket Fences  and appeared in movies ranging from  MASH  to  Alien,   Top Gun,   A River Runs Through It  and  Ted,  died on Wednesday of natural causes, Variety has confirmed with his publicist. He was 93.

The lean, rugged, mustachioed actor won an Emmy in 1993 and was also nominated in 1994 for playing Jimmy Brock, sheriff of the oddball town at the center of David E. Kelley's CBS dramedy  Picket Fences.  He also shared SAG Award nominations for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series for  Picket Fences  in 1995 and 1996 while also being nominated for outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series in 1995.

In the 2000s he guested on  The West Wing  as a senator, on  Law   Order: SVU  as a biased judge and on HBO's  Huff  as the father of Hank Azaria's title character, replacing Robert Forster in the role. He recurred from 2006-09 on ABC's  Brothers   Sisters  as family patriarch William Walker and guested on  The Good Wife  in 2014 and on  Madam Secretary  in 2015.

In Robert Altman's  MASH  (1970), Skerritt played Duke Forrest, one of the insubordinate but excellent surgeons. The actor was third billed, after Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould but before Sally Kellerman and Robert Duvall.

In Ridley's classic sci-fi horror film  Alien  (1979), Skerritt played Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo, and was first billed, ahead of Sigourney Weaver; he had originally turned down the part when the project had a low budget and no director attached. The actor also worked for Tony Scott, co-starring in the monumental 1986 hit  Top Gun  as Commander Mike  Viper  Metcalf, chief instructor at Miramar Naval Air Station's so-called top gun school, where Tom Cruise's Lieut. Pete  Maverick  Mitchell is training.

The Robert Redford-directed 1992 adaptation of Norman Maclean's much-admired 1976 novella  A River Runs Through It  afforded Skerritt with a relatively rare opportunity to do some serious acting in a film. He played a Presbyterian minister who is father to the characters played by Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer, with the 
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