‘IT TOOK A VERY ORIGINAL THINKER TO THINK OF ME FOR CERTAIN PARTS.’
When Sigourney Weaver strides into the Hollywood Celebrities Lounge at the Venice Film Festival, there’s no ceremonial entrance. She may have been on our screens for well over four decades, but she’s learnt how to separate the glitz from the grit of real life. ‘I’m just another goofy person trying to get along,’ she says. The red-carpet mania that’s just a few feet away? ‘I feel quite divorced from it. I feel like that’s over there. My life is over here.’
Wearing a peach blouse, beige slacks and white flats, gold earrings decorating her very recognisable face, the 73-yearold Weaver may be utterly down-to-earth, but there’s no escaping that career of hers. Breaking through in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien as Ellen Ripley - a role she replayed three more times, gaining a first Oscar nomination for James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens she almost single-handedly changed the way we thought about action heroines.
Yet Ripley is just a fraction of the output for this New York-born star. The daughter of a TV executive, she studied at Stanford and Yale School of Drama and ruled the 80s box office in comic blockbuster Ghostbusters and its 1989 sequel, playing Bill Murray’s obsession, Dana Barrett. In between, she stretched her dramatic muscles as real-life primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and corporate ballbuster Katharine Parker in Working Girl - scoring two further Oscar nods.
She was in her early 40s when she returned to Ripley - with an unforgettable shaven cranium - for 1992’s David Fincher misfire Alien3. It sparked a fruitful period where she defied the cliché that middle-aged actresses are expendable, working for Roman Polanski (Death and the Maiden), Ridley Scott (twice more, in 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Exodus: Gods and Kings), Ang Lee (The Ice Storm), M. Night Shyamalan (The Village) and not forgetting James Cameron (Avatar).
She can now add legendary scribe Paul Schrader to that list. His latest, , sees Weaver play Norma Haverhill, a well-to-do Republican who employs reformed neo-Nazi Narvel (Joel Edgerton) as her head gardener - and gatekeeper of her grand-niece (Quintessa Swindell). Forthright and frank, especially when it comes
