This is how we love to see our Ripley: sweat-soaked, eyes wide with fear and excitement, cradling a master blaster as the word "bitch" emanates from her lips. Who is Ellen Ripley, anyway? Just another cartoon action figure in a long line of humanoid-meets-slime-thing horror films - the latest of which, "Alien Resurrection," opens Nov. 26? Or is she more than that: feminist icon and teen role model, a strong woman who knows how to handle herself in a solar system filled with treacherous men and scary arthropods?
Or maybe, just maybe, Ripley is actually the alter ego of Sigourney Weaver, the actress who has played her lo these 20 years. "[Ripley is] open, honest, and tries to do the right thing," says Weaver. "I've always played Ripley as an ordinary person who is in extraordinary circumstances, and doesn't give up. I'm not playing a strong feminist statement; I'm playing this woman who has no one else to rely on."
Weaver is sitting in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, doing PR for her latest "Alien" extravaganza. Even though Ripley committed suicide in "Alien 3," the genius of Tinseltown screenwriting has managed to rescue her from the dead through the magic of cloning. In "Alien Resurrection," Ripley gives birth to an alien queen, falls in with a "baaad" group of demented scientists and runs around a space ship trying to escape those Evil Creatures From Another Solar System. It's generic "Alien" trash, and one hell of a lot of fun.
Not that Weaver affects Ripley style in person: no straggly hair, cynical mind-set or off-the-rack spacesuits. The 48-year old actress is tall and thin, almost hipless, with the fine-boned WASP good looks of a Fitzgerald character (if she weren't 6 feet tall, someone probably would have cast her as Daisy Buchanan years ago). For today's interview, Weaver is wearing chocolate-colored stretch pants, over-the-ankle "poppa's got a brand new bag" black boots and a multi-colored Asian-style brocade shirt. She's a babe. But not the kind of babe Hollywood seems particularly comfortable with. First and foremost there's the height thing, not something easy to overcome when so many top male stars are
several inches shorter than she is. Then there's the take-no-prisoners intelligence, which leads to critical thinking and a certain inability to suffer fools particularly well.
And despite her obvious feminine attractions, Weaver refuses to play up her sex appeal. "It was never important to me to display my sexuality," she says. "I didn't feel like I had to prove I was a babe to anyone. So I think maybe I always took parts based on the story and director, and very rarely on what the character was. [The roles] I get offered [are] isolated women. Women who are isolated for some reason, like Dian Fossey [in 'Gorillas in the Mist'], who was in love with the gorillas. It is easier for them to see me as a woman on my own. I can have a token love story, but in the end I'm gonna be this strong woman. Maybe it's harder for them to see me in a couples situation."
Weaver has been dealing with misperceptions like this throughout her career. Is she yin or yang? Sexy and babe-licious as in "The Year of Living Dangerously"? Or aloof, self-contained and almost neutered in flicks like "Copycat," "Death and the Maiden" and the latest "Alien"? In a way, this ambivalence has been to Weaver's benefit. She never plays bimbos (who could accept her as one?), and has been able to sink her considerable acting chops into some very meaty roles. But if "Alien" had never come along - the 1979 Ridley Scott film made Weaver an instant star - "Ironically, I might have had more of a comedy career," she says. "I think that's the one thing I'm really good at. "I would rather have stayed in the theater and done comedy. Comedy in film [was] so narrow for women. I was much happier doing very black comedy onstage, and I could never find anything of that ilk on film. The closest to what I might have accomplished was 'Working Girl.' "
Weaver has been struggling with forms of acceptance all her life. Daughter of British actress Elizabeth Inglis and former NBC president Sylvester (Pat) Weaver (he created both the "Today" and "Tonight" shows), Susan Weaver (she adopted the name Sigourney at age 14, from a character in "The Great Gatsby") was reared a child of privilege on Manhattan's upper East Side. But Weaver never felt entirely comfortable with her upbringing. Gawky and self-conscious, a dreamy kid who reached her adult height by the age of 13, Weaver was, she says, "very shy, very polite, very vulnerable. I was so uncomfortable with the Grace Kelly thing - In the beginning I was always compared to Grace Kelly - but I tried to stay away from that kind of beautiful [role]. I didn't want to be the beautiful girl. Politically it seemed to be so boring to be the beautiful girl who looked beautiful and who was charming and well-bred."
So Weaver decided to do a 180 from her expected role in life: during her stay at Stanford University, where she majored in English, Weaver was part of a theater troupe that protested the Vietnam War. She also took to wearing an elf suit, and lived with her boyfriend in a tree house. "It was very natural," says Weaver. "I had a boyfriend, we both played the flute, we made our own clothes. We certainly didn't attract more attention than anyone else around us."
That may have been the case on the West Coast, but when Weaver moved on to the Yale Drama School, her eccentricities were about as welcome as the smell from a defective sewage system. Weaver's time at Yale was hell - she was ignored, belittled, told that she was untalented and should pursue some other career. More than two decades later, memories of her New Haven experience can still unleash a torrent of honest anger. "They did not know what to do with me, because I looked like a leading lady, but I did not act like one," says Weaver. "I'm paying thousands of dollars to these guys to bully me and make me feel bad about myself? In the back of my mind I was so hopeless, I thought at least I'll stay and get my degree. 'Cause if I can't make it in New Haven, how can I make it in New York? Big error. At least in New York you can audition. I was never allowed to audition for anything at Yale. I never got anything to do unless I was a prostitute or an old woman."
Luckily for Weaver, New York casting directors didn't relate to her in the same way. She found work almost immediately, helped in no small measure by her friendship with playwright Christopher Durang, who cast her in several of his plays. But Weaver's height still played a major role in her professional acceptance. "Because I was tall, in a way it was an advantage, because [casting directors] didn't forget me," she says. "On the other hand I was always being cast by very imaginative directors in parts that should have gone to shorter women. So I couldn't get an agent for years - no one ever thought they knew what to do with me."
Then came Ripley. Weaver's combination of smarts, sexiness and bravery bowled over the critics and audiences. It didn't hurt that "Alien" eventually grossed more than $100 million, making it the kind of widely seen showcase film every actor hungers for. But despite solid work in "Eyewitness," "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Ghostbusters," it wasn't until the 1986 release of director James Cameron's "Aliens" - the rare sequel that is better than its original - that Sigourney Weaver became a true Hollywood player. Here, for the first time, was a movie that made use of all Weaver's gifts - tough but tender, smashingly confident but also riddled with self-doubt, Weaver's complex performance earned her an Oscar nomination.
"I've really lucked out, because for each ['Alien'] movie they found a relatively inexperienced, but very visionary sort of crazy director," says Weaver. "[But probably the best part was in Jim Cameron's movie, because it had this almost operatic structure to it. A lot was at stake, and it demanded a lot of me, in terms of going from being an outcast to being a mother, then a warrior. That probably had the best [story] arc in it."
This is serious stuff for Weaver. Ripley may not be her alter ego, but like any serious actor she connects with the character, sees it progressing and changing in every film. In "Alien," a by-the-book space-school graduate goes from being what Weaver calls "an intelligent moral person" to someone who is just surviving. "Aliens" pictures Ripley as an outcast who gains a child and potential lover, then sees almost everyone around her killed, leading to her becoming an outcast again. Weaver describes "Alien 3" as "the most spiritual and existential" film, in which Ripley asks "'do I want to live if there's never any place to live, never any connection with anybody?' It's a potentially suicidal film, but in the end she [commits suicide] for very explicit reasons, she makes that sacrifice."
And "Alien Resurrection?" Says Weaver: "She's been brought back, but they've botched it of course - she's a meat byproduct. She has this connection with another species, she's completely unpredictable. All she's thinking about is 'I want to live, to hell with everything else.' If you've died and come back again, things that seemed important for a long time no longer seem important. She's experienced everything."
Struggle, success, defeat, rebirth. In a way, this is also Weaver's story. Despite her tony background, Sigourney Weaver has not always had it easy. She's no bodacious blond or quirky-looking character type, not the kind of actress to whom you'd automatically attach the words "movie star." But like Ripley, Weaver refuses to give in to circumstance. Approaching the big 5-0, Weaver says she now wants to direct, to look for other career challenges. "My film career is odd, because I've only used up about a third of what I can do," she says. "That's why I keep struggling, because I hope by the end of my career I can put more of everything in it. That's why I feel like I'm just starting."
