Actor James Tolkan attends the "Back to the Future: The Musical" Broadway opening at the Winter Garden Theater, July 25, 2023, in New York. Tolkan died at the age of 94 on Thursday, March 26, 2026. (Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)
James Tolkan, a Navy veteran and character actor known for portraying a cigar-chomping commanding officer who chews out Tom Cruise’s character in “Top Gun,” died Thursday at age 94.
An actor with the air of a grizzled disciplinarian, he was also known for playing high school principal Mr. Strickland opposite Michael J. Fox in the “Back to the Future” trilogy. His death in Saranac Lake, N.Y., was announced in a brief obituary on the franchise’s website, which said his survivors include his wife of 54 years, Parmelee, and three nieces in Des Moines, Iowa. A cause of death was not given.
Tolkan served briefly in the Navy during the Korean War, completing basic training in San Diego before shipping out to Oakland, Calif., to prepare for duty aboard the Haskell-class attack transport USS Sandoval, he told the military and veteran-oriented website We Are The Mighty in a 2021 interview.
But after arriving in Oakland, Tolkan became ill and was sent to a naval hospital, where a heart issue was discovered, leading to his medical discharge.
Born in Calumet, Mich., in 1931, Tolkan lived in Chicago after his parents divorced and graduated from high school in 1949 in Tucson, Ariz., the online obituary said.
After being discharged from the Navy, he went to college in Iowa on the G.I. Bill, first at Coe College, then at the University of Iowa, where he studied theater, he said in 2021. After six years of college, he took a Greyhound bus to New York to become an actor.
With $75 in his pocket, he found a “cold water flat where the rent equaled his VA check,” the obituary said. It said he worked on the docks while studying acting with Stella Adler and Lee Strasburg, eventually spending 25 years in New York theater, “from off of Broadway to the Great White Way,” including as an original member of the ensemble cast of the 1984 Broadway run of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
The film website IMDb lists over 80 film, TV, and video game credits for Tolkan from 1960 to 2020, with his last credited film role in 2015’s “Bone Tomahawk.”
In 2021, he said he most enjoyed working with director Sidney Lumet on three films, “Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” and “Family Business.”
Tolkan often played cops, senior military officers and other authority figures, bringing a sense of gravity to the roles.
As Cmdr. Tom “Stinger” Jardian, commander of the USS Enterprise’s carrier air group in 1986’s “Top Gun,” he puts Cruise’s character, Maverick, in check early on before telling him and his weapons officer, Goose, that he’s reluctantly sending them to fly alongside the best of the best at Navy Fighter Weapons School, known as Top Gun.
“You screw up just this much, you’ll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog s--t out of Hong Kong,” he warns in one of several memorable lines.
If things had gone differently earlier in his life, Tolkan might have remained in the service, he said in the 2021 interview.
“I could have seen the Navy as a career until I got sick,” he said. “Anyway, it all worked out.”
