2024-10-08 10:59:18
Her breakthrough came in 1979 with “Alien”. Since then, Sigourney Weaver has been an integral part of the film industry. This is how she has changed.
She has been in front of the camera for almost 50 years and celebrated her film debut with “The City Neurotician” in 1977. Just two years later, Sigourney Weaver appeared in “Alien.” To this day, the intrepid heroine Ellen Ripley is considered one of her most famous roles. Director Ridley Scott had hired the then unknown theater actress for her first major film appearance in the sci-fi work “Alien – The Uncanny Creature from a Strange World”. She was in her late 20s when the film came out.
“I was Miss Nobody from nowhere!” Sigourney Weaver joked in Parade magazine. And actually she didn’t want the role at all. The plot on board the alien-infested spaceship was initially supposed to revolve solely around men. “But then the writers thought it was time to have a woman as the sole survivor,” she said.
She became Hollywood’s strong action woman overnight. The horror shocker was crowned with the Oscar for “best special effects” in 1980. Weaver’s second appearance in James Cameron’s sequel Aliens Returns earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1987.
Two years later she had twice the chances of winning. In the screen drama “Gorillas in the Mist” she transformed herself into the primatologist Dian Fossey – and was nominated for “best actress”. She was also in the running for “best supporting actress” in the comedy “Working Girl” – in German: “The Weapons of Women”. In it she appeared alongside Harrison Ford as a tough businesswoman. In total, Weaver has three Oscar nominations. But until now she always came away empty-handed.
The daughter of a British actress and an American television executive, Weaver was born in New York. At 1.80 meters tall, she initially didn’t believe in an acting career. “I felt like a giant spider,” she told Parade magazine. At the age of eleven, she already towered over her mother. “I never had the confidence to believe I could act.”
At the age of 13, she gave up her first name, Susan, and called herself Sigourney, after a character from the novel “The Great Gatsby.” “I was too big for ‘Sue,'” she joked in the “Parade” interview. Weaver studied literature and drama at the elite universities of Stanford and Yale. There were hurdles there too. The acting teachers at Yale initially told her that she had no talent for serious roles, Weaver recently said in an interview with “Deadline.” But she is now grateful for that, because it has led her to take very different directions.
According to the film database “IMDb”, the actress, who celebrates her 75th birthday today, has now starred in 99 films and television series. Sigourney Weaver was last seen in “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart” and took on the lead role in the series.
Weaver wants to be on stage in London next year. She makes her debut at the traditional Theater Royal Drury Lane in London’s West End in a production of William Shakespeare’s work “The Tempest”. Weaver will once again show her versatility as Prospero, a role usually played by a man.