Gender: Female Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Actor
Nationality: United States Executive summary:Alien
Born Susan Alexandra Weaver, she showed an early interest in literature, reading Moby Dick and other classics in grade school. She found the name 'Sigourney' in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and adopted it as her "stage name" at adolescence. At 16, she joined a summer stock troupe in Southbury, Connecticut. She later majored in English at Stanford, and got a second degree in drama at Yale. Weaver appeared in several off-Broadway plays, and understudied for a supporting role in a Broadway production of W. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife. She had a small role on Somerset, a daytime soap opera, but to most people, Sigourney Weaver was a complete unknown when she starred in Alien. That was part of what made Alien so effective.
Several other names in the cast were very familiar to audiences in 1979: Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto were bona fide movie stars, and John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Veronica Cartwright were recognizable character actors. Ticket-buyers logically assumed that Skerritt or Holm would turn out to be the movie's hero, but instead they were quickly eliminated. Alien offered many other clever twists, but this nifty casting trick -- killing the stars, one by one -- kept audiences unsure what to expect, and helped make the movie a hit.
Weaver has since appeared in several Alien sequels, taken supporting roles in comedies Ghostbusters, Working Girl, Dave, and Galaxy Quest, and made smaller, more thoughtful films like Eyewitness, The Year of Living Dangerously, Gorillas in the Mist, and The Ice Storm. She has been nominated for an Oscar three times.
Sigourney Weaver's mother was a successful movie actress before marrying. Her father, Pat Weaver, was a high-level executive at NBC, and served as the peacock network's president for several years in the 1950s. He is generally credited as the creator of Today and The Tonight Show.
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AKA Susan Alexandra Weaver