Sigourney Weaver
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Button-front dress by BOTTEGA VENETA Sigourney Weaver The statuesque star and sci-fi legend looks back on her extraordinary career, from her early days off-Broadway to the iconic roles that sent her stratospheric Portrait Mark Peckmezian Styling Emma Wyman Words Hannah Lack New York is notoriously oblivious to its celebrities, but even here, Sigourney Weaver changes the weather of a room when she enters. Tall, slender, with the bone structure of one of Truman Capote’s society “swans”, she has none of the icicle chill; she’s warm, funny and disarmingly curious when we meet on an ash-coloured, wintry afternoon in the days before Christmas. Untying a scarlet scarf, she chooses the corner table of a mirrored dining room tucked in the back of a fancy Upper East Side patisserie displaying towers of pastel- coloured macaroons in its windows. This blue-blooded, upscale neighbourhood – home to the mansions of Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Whitney – is etched into Weaver’s past: she may be Hollywood royalty but she’s a New Yorker born and bred, coming into the world just blocks from here in 1949, and growing up in a series of homes scattered across the Upper East Side. “And I’m still here!” she says, looking a decade younger than her 65 years, despite a career that has sent her hurtling into the outer reaches of the universe; onscreen, she’s faced demonic ghosts, serial killers, 400-pound gorillas, extra-terrestrials and transformed into a blue, chain-smoking 22nd-century botanist as Avatar’s Grace Augustine. It all began, famously, in a fight to the death with an acid-blooded Xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi Alien. As the sole survivor aboard the Nostromo space-tug, she lived to make three sequels and revolutionised action movies in the process. The taciturn, no-nonsense toughness Weaver brought to Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley gave cinema its first feminist in space, a flame-wielding intergalactic warrior – no shrieking or cute outfits or romantic interest – who paved the way for Terminator’s Sarah Connor, Buffy and beyond. Hollywood conventions have rarely applied to Weaver: an action hero with degrees from Stanford and Yale, she out-muscled Schwarzenegger at the box office at the same time as focusing her light-bulb intellect on arthouse fare with the likes of Roman Polanski, Peter Weir and Ang Lee. She’s as likely to show up in an experimental off-off Broadway play as a summer blockbuster. And if there’s a lack of rom-com in her filmography, you can forgive directors for rarely casting her in “ordinary” roles; it’s hard to imagine Weaver as anything but extraordinary, and no surprise Helmut Newton delighted in photographing the statuesque beauty, shooting the camera a maniacal grin atop a mountain of unspooled celluloid, clad in PVC gloves up to her elbows 1. Queens, astronauts, political leaders, trailblazing zoologists... “Well, anyone who works with me knows that I’m totally up for anything,” Weaver laughs. “Just about…” 1. Helmut Newton first shot Weaver in Los Angeles in 1983. “We had a terrible first day,” she says. “I disagreed with everything he said. We had a drink afterwards and I said something stupid like, ‘I’m not a puppet!’ He laughed. And we started communicating. He was so funny – he used to keep fake nipples in his top pocket! Helmut opened up whole new vistas for me, in terms of opening Pandora’s box and not being afraid of what’s inside. I’ve never worked with a director who made me feel that way.” 240 AnOther Magazine Spring/Summer 2015 241 Sigourney Weaver The actress’s early years whisper of privilege, spent between The teenage Weaver originally planned to become a a series of Manhattan abodes and old-moneyed Sands Point, on journalist. An English degree at Stanford tumbled her headlong Long Island’s north shore. She attended the elite Chapin School into 1969 California at its most political, volatile and exhilarating: on the Upper East Side, a private girl’s school with an alumni of “You couldn’t not get involved,” she remembers. “Reagan was America’s most illustrious surnames: a Hearst, a Trump, a Pulitzer governor, everyone was being called up with the draft… I was and Jacqueline Bouvier all passed through its doors. But aged part of a guerrilla theatre group called The Company, taking 12, Weaver might have seemed an unlikely candidate for the Shakespeare in a covered wagon around the Bay Area. We were Walk of Fame. At that time she was still Susan Weaver (christened anti-establishment, commedia dell’arte, ‘bring it to the people’.” after adventurer and family friend Susan Pretzlik), a self- Is it true in those years she lived in a tree house and dressed as confessed misfit kid, already an awkward 5’11” with unruly hair an elf? “Yes, I did do that,” Weaver laughs. “Sometimes I dressed and her nose in a book. “I was this tall, which was tough,” she as a tiger, though.” remembers. “People would assume I was much older, and Acting, however, was still just a hobby: ”I backed into this expect me to be mature – which is something that still hasn’t totally,” she says. “I was driven, but I don’t know that I was driven quite happened for me!” to become an actress. I thought, I’ll just run around and audition Perhaps the turning point began with a name; at 14, she for these drama schools, I’m sure they’ll turn me down.” Instead plucked the more flamboyant Sigourney from a minor character they all accepted, and she headed back east to Yale – Meryl in The Great Gatsby, deciding someone of her height demanded Streep was a fellow student. But while Streep trod the boards in a more sinuous sobriquet – her parents opted to call her “S” in a number of leading roles, the venerable establishment didn’t case it was a passing phase. Her mother and father were believe they had a future star on their hands in Weaver. “They something of an intoxicating double-act: Sylvester Weaver was didn’t know where to put me. I was funny, and Yale was not a very California-born to a wealthy roofing contractor, and he hung out funny place,” she says. “I think there was some cruelty going on with the likes of Carole Lombard and Loretta Young before there. At the end of the first year, half my class were thrown out, becoming president of NBC in 1953, during the formative days of and we were put on probation.” Did their obvious lack of faith television. Responsible for inventing both the Today and Tonight give her the determination to continue? “Determination is a nice shows, he was fêted for his intelligent approach to programming. word for it. I hung in there out of spite!” she laughs. After Yale, Weaver’s mother, Elizabeth Inglis, was English – a Colchester- Weaver returned to New York, rented a basement flat and began born actress who trained at RADA with Vivien Leigh and became to immerse herself in the city’s buoyant theatrical scene, taking to part of the Liverpool Repertory Company before heading for the the stage in her friends’ plays: “Unpaid, but fun! To be frank, my West End. She’d had a fleeting part in The 39 Steps and co-starred parents thought, she’ll do this for a bit and then get a job at with Bette Davis in The Letter and she set foot in New York just as Bloomingdale’s.” war broke out. “They met at a party – there were so many parties Onscreen, Weaver’s credits hadn’t stretched far beyond a in those days!” begins Weaver, tucking into a lunchtime croque Budweiser ad and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Annie Hall 2, monsieur. “She was in a play with Jessica Tandy at the time.” before she auditioned (in thigh-high “hooker boots”) for a young Weaver wed Inglis soon after, despite competition from a director named Ridley Scott. When he unleashed the dark, grimy swashbuckling thespian: “She went out with Errol Flynn for a space thriller that sent her stratospheric, she was so new to the number of years and he was desperate to marry her,” Weaver camera that Scott had to remind her not to look into it. Alien shot remembers. “In fact, I have a telegram dated right after my her straight from unknown, too-tall, off-Broadway actress to parents got married. It says, ‘Dear Liz, you’re still the most beautiful Hollywood superstar overnight. “When I got Alien, I wasn’t girl in the world to me, Errol.’” Inglis sounds like a character looking to have a film career. I wanted to be a ‘legitimate’ Weaver might play onscreen: a beautiful actress who could also actress, do repertory like my mother had. I remember thinking, kick ass on the tennis court: “My mother was amazing, she could don’t worry, it’s a small film, it’s cool and edgy, kind of like an off- have done anything,” Weaver nods. “She got into Wimbledon at off Broadway movie.” (Being Weaver, she put herself into 16, but her father wouldn’t let her play. She was a great athlete, character by imagining she was playing Henry V on Mars, and she had such determination, discipline… she was a force!” But this drew inspiration from the female warriors of classic Chinese Opposite page: Sigourney Weaver, Italian Vogue, Los Angeles 1983 by Helmut Newton © Estate of Helmut Newton/Maconochie Photography of Helmut Newton Helmut © Estate 1983 by Angeles Los Vogue, Italian Weaver, page:Opposite Sigourney was the 50s; after her marriage, she retired to raise Sigourney literature.) Her character was famously written as a man originally and her brother, Trajan, becoming hostess to a shifting circle of until a last-minute switch was made to wrong-foot the audience.