Almost any sci-fi film nerd will already know the story about why the death of Captain Dallas in Ridley Scott’s landmark 1979 film, Alien, is not shown on-screen. Rather, the alien xenomorph rears up before him, and then the camera cuts away to a shot of Ripley, listening in on a radio to her captain’s apparent “death.”
In the original script, however, Ripley finds Dallas still alive near the end of the film. He’s bound in some kind of partial cocoon as a new alien specimen gestates in his body. As an act of mercy, she kills him with her flame-thrower, then makes her final escape. The scene was actually shot and is, I believe, included on some special editions of the film. But it was cut from the original release, presumably for reasons of pacing. But I believe Scott might also have chosen to leave it out for another, more subtle reason—people didn’t want to see Tom Skerritt die. Not on-screen, anyway. They just liked him too much.
How could they not? He was an actor who exuded an unusual mixture of masculinity and vulnerability, strength and warmth. Handsome but not overly so, he usually played soft-spoken, stalwart, working-class characters, of which Dallas is perhaps the best example. In David Cronenburg’s The Dead Zone, he played a noble, small-town sheriff who is desperate to stop a serial killer. And in Tony Scott’s Top Gun, he played Tom Cruise’s wise, gruff mentor and surrogate father-figure.
Fame came late to him. He was forty-five when he played Dallas in Alien. But once it came, it never let up. He remained one of the most successful character actors in Hollywood. His roles were frequent but not terribly diverse. Very seldom did he get a chance to play the leading man. (CBS’s show Picket Fences was an exception, a role for which he received an Emmy.) And even more rarely did he play a villain. (The self-serving, opportunistic Nasa bureaucrat in Contact was about as close as he ever got.)
But in every part played, and in every movie in which he appeared, he was one of the highlights. A stand-out.
Godspeed, Mr. Skerritt!
