Sigourney Weaver

Info

Full Name: Sigourney Weaver
Date of birth: October 8, 1949 (76 years old)
Location: New York, New York
Country: USA

Sigourney Weaver has been active for 2026 years, participating in 56 movies that average a 6.8/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

When Ridley Scott was casting 'Alien' in 1979, the part of warrant officer Ripley was written in the script as a man. He handed it instead to a tall, largely unknown stage actress, and in doing so created the first great female action hero in Hollywood history. Nearly five decades on, Sigourney Weaver has three Oscar nominations, a BAFTA, two Golden Globes won on a single night and honorary awards from Venice, San Sebastián and the Spanish Film Academy, and she is still opening blockbusters.

Susan Alexandra Weaver was born in Manhattan on 8 October 1949. Television ran in the family: her father, Pat Weaver, was president of NBC and created the 'Today' and 'Tonight' shows, while her mother, Elizabeth Inglis, was an English actress who set her career aside to raise her. At thirteen, deciding that Susan no longer suited her nearly six foot frame, she renamed herself Sigourney after a minor character in 'The Great Gatsby'. Her uncle, Doodles Weaver, was a famous comedian, so performing was in the blood.

After reading English at Stanford she took a master's at the Yale School of Drama, where Meryl Streep was a classmate and where her tutors bluntly told her she had no talent and should stick to comedy. She has admitted she left Yale close to a nervous breakdown. Her screen debut lasted six seconds, as the date waiting for Woody Allen outside the cinema in 'Annie Hall' (1977). At Yale she had also befriended playwright Christopher Durang, the start of a lifelong partnership on the New York stage.

Ripley and the reluctant queen of science fiction

'Alien' changed everything. Ripley became a feminist icon, later ranked by the American Film Institute among the greatest heroes in cinema history, and when James Cameron revived the saga with 'Aliens' (1986), her ferocious rematch with the alien queen earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, almost unheard of for science fiction. She returned, now also as co producer, in David Fincher's 'Alien 3' (1992) and in 'Alien: Resurrection' (1997) alongside Winona Ryder.

Two Golden Globes in one night

Far from being typecast, she lined up one prestige project after another: the British correspondent of Peter Weir's 'The Year of Living Dangerously' (1982) with Mel Gibson, then Dana Barrett, the possessed cellist wooed by Bill Murray in 'Ghostbusters' (1984), the biggest comedy hit of its day, a role she reprised in 'Ghostbusters II'.

Then came 1988, the year that made her Hollywood royalty. She was primatologist Dian Fossey in 'Gorillas in the Mist' and the scheming boss of Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford in Mike Nichols's 'Working Girl'. The double act brought two simultaneous Oscar nominations and two Golden Globes handed over on the same night, a first for any performer; she shared the dramatic actress prize in a famous three way tie with Jodie Foster and Shirley MacLaine. Three nominations later, the Oscar itself still eludes her.

Polanski, a Spanish queen and a cult spoof

The nineties showed her range. She played Queen Isabella of Spain in Ridley Scott's '1492: Conquest of Paradise' (1992), the First Lady of the comedy 'Dave' (1993) and a torture survivor confronting Ben Kingsley in Roman Polanski's chamber thriller 'Death and the Maiden' (1994).

She was an agoraphobic profiler in 'Copycat' (1995) and a bored suburban adulteress in Ang Lee's 'The Ice Storm' (1997), which won her the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress. After the tearjerker 'One True Thing' (1998) she gleefully sent up her own sci fi royalty as the exasperated actress of 'Galaxy Quest' (1999), now a certified cult classic.

Comedy, the register her Yale tutors grudgingly allowed her, has never been far away either: she vamped through 'Heartbreakers' (2001), ran a brutal desert camp in the family favourite 'Holes' (2003) and gamely voiced herself in 'Finding Dory' (2016).

Pandora, Prospero and the New Republic

In 2009 James Cameron cast her as Dr. Grace Augustine in 'Avatar', still the highest grossing film ever made. The sequels brought a stranger challenge: in 'Avatar: The Way of Water' (2022), which itself passed 2.3 billion dollars, she used performance capture to play Kiri, a Na'vi teenager, at over 70 years of age, and she returned in 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' (2025), the fourth Cameron film to sail past the billion dollar mark, with more than 1.4 billion taken so far.

In between she was the matriarch of M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Village', the sceptical scientist of 'Red Lights', the voice of the ship's computer in 'WALL-E', the grandmother in J.A. Bayona's 'A Monster Calls', the shadowy Director of 'The Cabin in the Woods' and Dana Barrett once more in 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' (2021). Television has given her four Emmy nominations, including one as the former First Lady turned Secretary of State of 'Political Animals' and another for narrating 'Secrets of the Whales', plus a memorably icy villain turn in Marvel's 'The Defenders' (2017).

Her ties to Britain go beyond her English mother. A devoted fan of 'Doc Martin', she popped up in the Cornish comedy as an American tourist, and in December 2024 she made a headline grabbing West End debut at 75, playing Prospero in Jamie Lloyd's production of 'The Tempest' at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the first Shakespeare staged there in almost seventy years. It was her first public Shakespeare in more than thirty years, and Lloyd assumed she would decline; she replied within a day. Decades earlier, 'Hurlyburly' had brought her a Tony nomination on Broadway.

The honours keep arriving: the Donostia Award at San Sebastián in 2016, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice in 2024, where she became only the third American actress so honoured after Jane Fonda and Jamie Lee Curtis, and Spain's International Goya that same year, following Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche. She accepted the Golden Lion on opening night with the words: "I want to roar".

Offscreen her life has been strikingly steady by Hollywood standards. She has been married to theatre director Jim Simpson since October 1984, after they met at the Williamstown festival, and their child Charlotte was born in 1990. Simpson founded the off Broadway theatre The Flea, where Weaver starred in 'The Guys', the New York stage's first response to September 11. Playing Dian Fossey left a permanent mark too: she is honorary chair of the gorilla conservation fund that bears the primatologist's name.

At 76 her diary is fuller than ever. Recent months have brought the Apple TV+ thriller 'The Gorge' with Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, the dark fable 'Dust Bunny' with Mads Mikkelsen and her entry into the Star Wars universe as Colonel Ward in 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' (2026). Next comes Prime Video's Tomb Raider series, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in which she plays Evelyn Wallis opposite the Lara Croft of Sophie Turner. Cameras started rolling in January 2026.

Somewhere along the way, the Yale tutors who told her to give up acting were proved spectacularly wrong. Weaver, characteristically, says she is grateful to them: being underestimated is what pushed her to charge at everything. Ripley would approve.