family only really united when they go fly fishing. Variety said:  Tom Skerritt discreetly reveals the loving core inside the reedy exterior of the boys' preacher father. 

Skerritt was among the celebrities who cameo'd as themselves in Seth MacFarlane's scabrous 2012 comedy  Ted.  He appeared in supporting roles as an academic in the 2013 campus-set romantic comedy  At Middleton,  starring Vera Farmiga and Andy Garcia, and as Ulysses S. Grant in  Field of Lost Shoes  (2014).

The year after  MASH  he appeared in  Harold and Maude  as a motorcycle cop.

He worked with Altman again in 1974's  Thieves Like Us,  starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, and also appeared that year as a bank robber in Roger Corman cult classic  Big Bad Mama,  in which he was third billed after Angie Dickinson and William Shatner. Skerritt starred with Ernest Borgnine and Shatner in 1975 horror film  The Devil's Rain. 

In Herbert Ross' esteemed 1977 film  The Turning Point,  in which Anne Bancroft plays an aging dancer at New York's Ballet Theater and Shirley MacLaine her old friend who moved to Oklahoma City and started a family, Skerritt played the MacLaine character's husband, earning the National Board of Review's best supporting actor award.

Skerritt also had a notable role in a very different vein in the 1978 Cheech and Chong movie  Up in Smoke,  in which he played Strawberry, the Cheech character's cousin - a Vietnam vet who has a flashback during a police raid, believing the cops to be Viet Cong.

The actor had a sizable role in David Cronenberg's 1983 adaptation of Stephen King's  The Dead Zone.  Roger Ebert said:  The movie is filled with good performances [including] Tom Skerritt as the local sheriff who wants to enlist this psychic to solve a chain of murders. 

In 1988 he starred with Nancy Allen and Lara Flynn Boyle in  Poltergeist III. 

He played the father of Julia Roberts' bride-t0-be in Herbert Ross'  Steel Magnolias,  a 1989 hit movie that found little use for the men in the cast; the actor played the estranged father of Charlie Sheen's character in Clint Eastwood's  The Rookie  (1990). In the steamy 1992 thriller  Poison Ivy,  he played a father who's all but ravished by the best friend of his daughter (Sara Gilbert): the evil, seductive Ivy, played by Drew Barrymore.

In the sixth season of the hit NBC sitcom  Cheers  (1987-88), Skerritt had a story arc as Evan Drake, boss to Kirstie Alley's Rebecca Howe, who has an unrequited crush on him.

He starred as a small-town sheriff investigating a homicide in the well-regarded TV movie  The China Lake Murders  (1990).

After appearing in  Picket Fences  from 1992-96, he had a supporting role in Robert Zemeckis'  Contact  (1997), starring Jodie Foster. The actor appeared in a series of TV movies and had supporting roles in  Texas Rangers  (2001) and Antoine Fuqua's mercenary war drama  Tears of the Sun  (2003), starring Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci. In 2010 he appeared in Mario Van Peebles'  Redemption Road ; Variety said:  Tom Skerritt contributes a pitch-perfect supporting performance as the sage owner of a small-town honkytonk. 

Thomas Roy Skerritt was born in Detroit and attended Wayne State University and UCLA. He did a stint in the U.S. Air Force.

He made his feature debut in the Korean War drama  War Hunt  (1962), starring John Saxon and Sydney Pollack; Robert Redford had a small part, and Francis Ford Coppola had an uncredited role. He next appeared in the 1965 feature  Those Calloways. 

Skerritt made guest appearances on series including  The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,   My Three Sons,   Wagon Train,   My Favorite Martian,   The Fugitive  and  Gunsmoke  during the decade and on  Hawaii Five-O,   Cannon,   Barnaby Jones  and  Baretta  in the 1970s before his appearance in 1979's  Alien  dialed up his career.

Skerritt was thrice married, the first time to Charlotte Shanks (1957-72), the second time to Sue Oran (1977-1992). Both of these marriages ended in divorce.

He is survived by third wife Julie Tokashiki, whom he married in 1998; sons Andy and Matt, a director, and daughter Erin by Shanks; and son Colin by Oran.