Sigourney Weaver

The Full Biography

Sigourney Weaver. Actress. The Manhattan kid who made a warrant officer into a civic grammar, then spent four decades proving a science-fiction heroine could also be a comedy, a gorilla picture, and a woman who kept the same marriage.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a woman in a singlet, flame in one hand, a child behind her, telling a creature to get away — a line the culture still quotes as if it were a national anthem of refusal. The year was 1986. The picture was Aliens. What the still cannot show is Susan Alexandra Weaver of New York, a television executive's daughter, a Yale drama student, a fourteen-year-old who lifted a name out of The Great Gatsby, and a living woman who has now played Ripley, Dana Barrett, Dian Fossey, and a Na'vi teenager without agreeing to be only one of them.

She was born on October 8, 1949, in Manhattan. Her father, Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, had been president of NBC and had helped invent Today and The Tonight Show. Her mother, Elizabeth Inglis, was an English actress who had been in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. The household was show business as furniture, not as a dare. Ethel Walker School. Sarah Lawrence. Stanford, a degree in English. Then the Yale School of Drama, an M.F.A., the same building that held Meryl Streep. She has said the name change happened at fourteen, out of Fitzgerald: Sigourney Howard is a minor guest in Gatsby's lists. She picked it out of the book. Susan, she decided, was not the name of the life she intended to have.

The door was a blink and then a scream in the dark. Woody Allen put her in Annie Hall (1977) for a walk-through. Ridley Scott put her in Alien (1979) as Ellen Ripley, a warrant officer on the Nostromo, and did not tell the audience, at first, that the last person standing would be a woman. She was not hired as a final girl in the slasher sense. She was hired as a professional who would do the job after the men had stopped being able to. The picture made her a star and made science fiction a place a serious actress could work without apology.

Eyewitness (1981). Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), opposite Mel Gibson, a Jakarta picture that treated her as a mind. Then Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984), Dana Barrett, a cello and a refrigerator and a possession gag the whole country bought. She could be funny without asking Ripley for a pass. James Cameron's Aliens (1986) brought the warrant officer back as a soldier and a reluctant mother, and the Academy nominated her for Best Actress — a rare nod for a picture the town still filed as genre. She did not win. She had been seen as something other than a scream.

1988 is the year the range became undeniable. Gorillas in the Mist, Dian Fossey, a conservationist in the Virunga mountains, a nomination for Best Actress. Working Girl, Katharine Parker, a boss in a Tess McGill picture, a nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Two nominations, one season, action and drama already behind her. In January 1989 she won two Golden Globes in a single night for those two parts. The industry, which prefers its women in one drawer, had to keep two open.

I was reading The Great Gatsby and I picked it out of the book.Sigourney Weaver, on the name she took at fourteen

She married the stage director Jim Simpson on October 1, 1984. They have one daughter, Charlotte. Simpson's Flea Theater in New York is a downtown room, not a Hollywood annex; she has used it as a working address, not a vanity plank. The marriage is, as of this decade, past forty years, a fact the columns underuse because it does not behave like a headline. The household has had to share a wife and mother who is also a colonial marine and a possessed cellist. Friends from the Cameron sets describe a professional who trains as if the creature were real. Friends from the Flea describe a woman who will do a small play as if the creature were not the point.

She went back to Ripley for David Fincher's Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection (1997), pictures the faithful still argue about and that she treated as jobs with a character she was not finished with. Fincher's film is a prison-planet closing; Jeunet's is a clone and a joke about corporate meat. She played both as if the warrant officer still had paperwork. Dave (1993) put her in the White House as a First Lady who has to decide whether a look-alike is a rescue. Death and the Maiden (1994) for Roman Polanski, from Ariel Dorfman's play, put her in a room with a man who may have been her torturer, a part that asked for a different kind of steel than a flamethrower. Copycat (1995), a terrified expert. Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), a Connecticut suburb as a moral weather, a wife in a key party the 1970s have never lived down. Galaxy Quest (1999), a parody that is also a love letter, a science-fiction actress playing a science-fiction actress, the joke and the respect in the same walk. She has said the part understood what the other pictures had cost. James Cameron called again. Avatar (2009) made her Dr. Grace Augustine, a scientist in a blue world; Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) made her Kiri, a Na'vi adolescent, motion capture, a different body, the same collaborator. She has now been in Cameron pictures across four decades. The collaboration is a second occupation. Between those landmarks she kept a New York stage life that the franchise posters do not advertise. Simpson's Flea Theater gave her rooms too small for a xenomorph and exactly the right size for a sentence. She has said, without decoration, that the stage is where the instrument stays honest. The pictures pay the house. The plays keep the ear. Both are the job.

The turn is the refusal to be only Ripley, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the flamethrower. The turn is that she kept taking the odd part, the stage part, the comedy, the conservation picture, the motion-capture teenager, as if the warrant officer were a colleague and not a cage. A lot of franchise faces become the franchise. She became an actress who happens to have saved a ship.

The later years

The years after the first Avatar are a working sixties and seventies, not a retirement in the creature's shadow. She has done M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004), Vantage Point (2008), Neill Blomkamp's Chappie (2015), A Monster Calls (2016), The Good House (2021) opposite Kevin Kline, a New England comedy about a woman who drinks and will not be pitied; Call Jane (2022), an abortion-network picture that treated her as institutional memory rather than a mascot. She has gone back to the stage with Simpson, including work that never made a trade-paper cover and did not need to. She has used the Fossey fame as a conservation lever, not as a costume: the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the forests, the unglamorous committee work that follows a famous picture about a famous death. She does not orate about it. She shows up for it. The Virunga weather is still in the file. So is a New York winter outside the Flea. She has also, without making a brand of it, been willing to talk about what the 1980s cost a woman who led action pictures before the town had a language for that fact. She did not become a speechmaker on the subject. She became a precedent. Younger actresses who take the flamethrower now are walking a path she cut without a map. She will acknowledge that if asked. She will not make it the whole interview. The next rehearsal is the point.

The Avatar sequels are a long employment. Cameron's water picture asked her to play youth inside a machine, a technical job as much as an emotional one, and she took it the way she once took a flamethrower: as a problem to be solved in the room. More sequels are on the books. She is, as of this decade, still a Cameron actor, still a New York theater person, still a woman who will do a small independent as if the billion-dollar pictures had not happened. The combination is rare and she does not explain it. The call sheet is the explanation. She has also kept the science-fiction convention circuit at arm's length and then, when she goes, treated the fans as colleagues in a long story rather than as customers. Comic-Con 2016, the thirtieth year of Aliens, is a still in the file: she stands at a microphone and talks about Ripley as a person she is not finished understanding. That is not a franchise obligation. It is an actress's unfinished business. Between those rooms she goes back to Simpson and to the Flea and to a New York that knew her as Susan before the book gave her the other name. The two names still live in the same household. The work is to keep them both employed. She has taken, in these years, the voice work and the motion-capture work that younger stars now treat as a career track, and she treats them as acting: a body in a volume, a breath in a microphone, a child in a forest who happens to be played by a woman in her seventies. The technical file is not a stunt. It is the same precision the Nostromo required, moved into a different machine. Charlotte has her own life. Simpson still directs. The marriage that began in 1984 is now older than most of the franchises. That, too, is a kind of late style the columns underuse.

She is in her seventies. The height is still a fact in a doorway. The voice is still a fact on a soundtrack. She has not become a nostalgia panelist who only remembers 1979, and she has not become a franchise executive who only greenlights the next xenomorph. She has become, instead, a working actress whose most famous part is a colleague she can visit without moving in. Charlotte is grown. Simpson is still the director in the house. The Flea is still a downtown fact. Friends from the late pictures describe the same first-in, last-out habit the Aliens crew remembers. The habit is the late style.

New parts keep arriving. A drama. A voice. A sequel. A play. She will take the ones that interest the instrument and the ones that keep the New York life possible, and she will not apologize for either column. Then she will go home. The 1979 picture made her a grammar. The decades since have made her an American actress who can still start over inside a capture volume. Both are the life, and the second is the one she is living.

What she will not do is retire into a singlet and a flame. She will play the mother, the scientist, the girl in the forest, the woman in a kitchen in a small picture. She will sit for the few interviews that do not require a theory of the female action hero, then go back to the rehearsal. The scream is the still. The marriage, the theater, the second Na'vi, and the next play are the file. If the culture keeps only the flamethrower, the culture has the poster. She has the rest of the call sheet.

After the spotlight moved

It moved toward younger warrant officers and then came back every time a picture needed a woman who would not leave the ship. Ripley still teaches a kind of American refusal. Dana Barrett still teaches a kind of American joke. Fossey still teaches a kind of American cost. The Flea still has a board. The forest still has a fund.

She came out of a network household, named herself out of a novel, walked through Annie Hall, saved the Nostromo, got slimed in a Manhattan apartment, took two nominations in one year, married a downtown director, went back to Pandora as someone else, and kept working. If you only remember the flame, you have the still. If you remember the book, the cello, the gorillas, and Kiri, you have her.

Portrait: Harald Krichel · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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