Five days after Tom Skerritt died at 93, one of his granddaughters opened her phone and shared the last picture she has of the two of them together. It is a FaceTime screenshot, the kind of everyday image most families never think twice about, and Maddison Garcia posted it to Instagram over the weekend with a caption that reads like a letter to him. Parade reported on the post on October 25 and 26.
Skerritt, born August 25, 1933, in Detroit, died on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, of natural causes, his family said. Most of us knew him as the steady man in the uniform, whether it was a flight suit, a sheriff’s badge or a spaceship captain’s jacket. Tom Skerritt’s granddaughter remembered someone else entirely, and what she wrote about their final call is the closest the public has come to seeing the man his family lost.
What Did Tom Skerritt’s Granddaughter See On That Last Call?
“My last FaceTime with him,” Maddison began, and then she wrote plainly about what the past months had been like. “It’s so wild seeing death,” she said. “Over the last year his spirit slowly left his body.” She compared it to watching the Pixar film Coco, the story of a family bound together across generations, and described her grandfather near the end as “an animated skeleton with so much light shining through.”
She also wrote about what she called “so many weird synchronicities” between that FaceTime picture, their last true connection, and the date of his death. Both Parade and Hello! reported that she described an accidental call from his phone that brought her to a neighborhood gathering before he was taken away, so she was there at the very end. That moment says a great deal about the kind of family he built.
Who Was Tom Skerritt When The Cameras Were Off?
He was a father first, and he said so often. Skerritt married three times and raised five children: Andy, Erin and Matt with his first wife, Charlotte Shanks; Colin with his second wife, Sue Oran; and a daughter, Emiko, whom he adopted with his wife of 28 years, Julie Tokashiki. “I had to raise my kids myself, pretty much,” he told Closer Weekly in 2020, looking back on his early years in Hollywood. He once told the Ottawa Citizen that he set aside his hopes of directing because “then the family came along and I had to support them.”
He met Julie on the Fox lot, where she was a studio executive while he was filming Picket Fences. They married in 1998, and in 2020 they started a film company together called Triple Squirrels. “I look at her with a great deal of respect and marvel at who she is,” he told Closer Weekly. “She’s just a great piece of art.” In that same interview, he bragged a little about the next generation: “They’re all wonderful! I have a son who’s a cinematographer and director and five granddaughters. I’m lucky!”
Those granddaughters are Sara, Maddison, Sunny, Louisa and Georgia, and the family announcement also named two great-grandchildren, Marigold and Ravi. When he was chosen for the International Press Academy’s Mary Pickford Award in 2022, Skerritt wrote on X that “my one goal in life has always been to be a good father, and provide for my family.” His family returned the feeling in their statement last week. “While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career,” they said, “we knew him for his humor, curiosity, wisdom, generosity, and the love he brought into our lives.”
Why Did So Many Of Us Feel Like We Knew Him Too?
Maybe because he kept turning up at the moments we remember best. He was Duke, the easygoing Georgia surgeon, in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H in 1970, and nine years later he was Captain Dallas, the man who climbed into the air ducts in Alien. In 1986 he was Viper, the commander who looked Tom Cruise in the eye in Top Gun. Fans of Cheers will remember him as Evan Drake, the wealthy executive Rebecca set her sights on in 1987.
Then came the roles that made him everybody’s dad. He was Drum Eatenton, the bird-chasing father of Julia Roberts’s Shelby, in Steel Magnolias, and the minister father in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. In the 1990s, he was Sheriff Jimmy Brock of Rome, Wisconsin, on Picket Fences, a role that won him the Emmy for lead actor in a drama series in 1993. His TV wife Kathy Baker spoke out after his death, and Julia Roberts posted, “A shining light of a gentle man.”
He had a good sense of his own place in all of it. “A writer once described me as a character actor locked in a leading man’s body, and I’ve always loved that,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1997. Yet the person who knew him in his last year wanted the world to hear something no screen credit could tell.
The Words Maddison Saved For Him
“Such a complex, rich and wonderful human experience he lived,” Maddison wrote. Then she put it in the simplest terms a granddaughter could. “He saved my life,” she wrote. “He gave me life.” He loved them all “so much in his weird way,” she added, and he “obsessed over the imagination and creation and art and music.”
She ended the post the way so many families feel in the first raw days after a loss, speaking to him directly and for all of them at once. “We all miss you so much it hurts.”
