Sigourney Weaver biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Born Susan Alexandra Weaver on October 8, 1949, in New York City, New York. Weaver began calling herself Sigourney at the age of 14 after she discovered the name in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The daughter of English actress Elizabeth Inglis and former NBC president Sylvester Weaver, Weaver grew up fully immersed in the entertainment business.

Despite a privileged childhood, Weaver's formative years weren't always easy. She lacked confidence in her own beauty, a trait brought on by the fact that she was generally taller than most girls she knew and by her mom, who told her at the age of 8 that she was simply "plain" looking. "I thought, well, if my mother doesn't think I'm pretty ... no one else will," Weaver once said.

At 13 Weaver was sent to see a psychiatrist to address what her parents perceived to be their daughter's uncommunicative personality. "I never even spoke to the psychiatrist," Weaver recalled. "I was a normal teenager, and teenagers hate telling their parents anything."

After private high school in Connecticut, Weaver landed at California's Stanford University. It was there that she realized she wanted to be an actress. After graduating with a B.A. in literature in 1971, Weaver moved back east to Connecticut to attend Yale Drama School. She finished the program in 1974, one year before another actress and new friend, Meryl Streep.

Career Breakthoughs

Over the next several years Weaver found steady work in a host of off-Broadway shows. She also landed a role on the short-lived soap, Somerset, and earned a small part as Woody Allen's movie date in the now-classic film Annie Hall (1977).

But it was her performance as the tough Ripley in the 1979 mega-hit Alien that catapulted Weaver to stardom and offered her a lineup of other film work to choose from. Over the next decade she starred in a host of well-received films, including The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) with Mel Gibson and the wildly popular comedy Ghost Busters (1984).

In 1986, Weaver reprised her Ripley role for the Alien sequel, Aliens, which garnered the star an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Two years later, Weaver was nominated again for Best Actress for her performance in Gorillas in the Mist (1989). That same year, she earned a second nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the film Working Girl (1988).

Weaver's busy workload continued throughout the 1990s. She again played Ripley in Aliens 3 (1992) and again in Alien Resurrection (1997). She took on a lighter role as First Lady in the fun hit, Dave (1993), co-starring Kevin Kline. Four years later, the pair teamed up again in the indie drama The Ice Storm, a moody portrait of family and suburban life set in the 1970s.

In recent years, Weaver has continued to demonstrate her range as an actress and her willingness to