From woman warrior to comedy queen, feisty intellectual to badass boss, Sigourney Weaver has proved that variety is the spice of a decades-long brilliant career
When Sigourney Weaver stars next year at the age of 59 as Dr. Grace Augustine in James Cameron’s $200 million science fiction megapic Avatar, she’ll be punching a longawaited hole in the celluloid ceiling for women: parity at last with Eastwood, Ford, and the rest of the male stars who can headline a Hollywood blockbuster even though they’re—gak—middle-aged. But for Weaver, setting this landmark will be an anniversary. In 1979 she became the first female action hero when she played Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, the only woman and sole survivor of a doomed starship crew in Alien, Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror epic. “It had nothing to do with feminism,” she says wryly. “Men decided to make Ripley a woman for commercial reasons.” Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, made her role more soulful as well as explicitly feminist and pertinent to women’s lives. The movie’s famous ad, featuring a battle-smeared Weaver cradling a huge gun in one arm and a frightened little girl in the other, graced bulletin boards in women’s offices around the country. Not only was the child-loving Ripley fighting a corrupt male corporation that had a stranglehold on the universe, but she strapped herself into a cumbersome device called a powerloader when she had to do combat. What ’80s working woman didn’t know what that felt like?
Avatar features a group of scientists who travel to a distant planet, but this time there are bad guys among the humans and Weaver’s wicked smart Augustine holds the power. “I didn’t want to channel Ripley, yet Sigourney was so perfect for this role that I got out of my own way and begged her to read the script,” says Cameron, who cast Weaver after overriding “mild studio static” about age. “Sigourney is very meticulous: She bites off pieces of a scene and works them for a while. It’s exciting for a director to watch what she’s building emerge.”
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