Sigourney Weaver and a career marked by her role as Ellen Ripley in ‘Alien’

It is perhaps the first example of an entire life dedicated to defying those who recommended certain paths to carry out her life and choosing only the direction that her own instinct indicated was what led her to choose the name with which she became celebrity.

Susan Alexander Weaver found a minor, almost insignificant character named Sigourney Howard in the pages of ‘The Great Gatsby’, and she liked her so much that she adopted her forever as her own.

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“I decided to make it Sigourney so they would stop calling me Suzy. They call me Siggy now too, but I don’t care. I guess what I wanted was to be someone else, to feel different. But in the end no one can escape her destiny,” the actress told the Spanish newspaper a few years ago. The country.

He found that destiny as soon as he left theater school, while his name frequently appeared in plays performed within the New York circuit known as off-Broadway and at the same time he began his career in cinema. She was not a child, she was almost 30 years old when she joined the cast of Alien, the eighth passengerdirected in 1979 by Ridley Scott, and launched the story of ‘Ellen Ripley’, a character from which almost all the great screen heroines would be configured to this day.

“’Ripley’ was certainly not what I had in mind when I thought about getting into film. I always imagined that I would work my way through small roles and play a lot of those characters. Become a heroine? I would never have imagined it,” she would explain long after definitively becoming a star.

At first, Weaver rejected the idea of ​​entering the front door of cinema through science fiction: “I was a total snob, I wanted to do works by Mike Nichols, Shakespeare and Woody Allen at that time. Science fiction didn’t attract my attention. In the end I accepted and made the decision to play ‘Ripley’ as if I were Henry V on Mars.”

From its place in one of the most continued science fiction cinematic stories in recent decades, did not stop growing. After Alien, the eighth passengerarrive Aliens, the return (1986), one of James Cameron’s masterpieces, for which he won the first of his three Oscar nominations. This second appearance is even richer and more complex for a character who, as the critic Angel Faretta pointed out in the defunct magazine ironaccepts “beyond the physical her feminine essence and, therefore, motherhood.”

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The place of the heroine in the cinema would find a new dimension from there, even though Weaver has not personified ‘Ripley’ from the awareness of that perspective. “I didn’t interpret it that way. It was not my intention. “I had a different idea of ​​everything that would happen going forward with my character,” she justified.

Over time, Weaver ended up accepting his place. That destiny in his case had been written from the beginning began to take on the contours of an indisputable truth. And he began to feel so comfortable with the character that she agreed to return to him two more times. first in Alien 3 (1992), by David Fincher, and finally in Alien, resurrection (1997), by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

The influence of the defining character of Sigourney Weaver’s film career remained visible throughout the following decades in front of mirrors as powerful as The Hunger Games, Underworld and Mad Maxthree titles that in the image and likeness of Alien They became successful cinematographic formulas with several films under their belts.

That is the main justification of the Spanish Film Academy for awarding Sigourney Weaver the international Goya for lifetime achievement this year. The award, recognized throughout the world as equivalent to the Oscar for Spanish-speaking cinema, was presented to him on February 10 “for inspiring us with independent, complex and strong characters.”

Jennifer Lawrence said that Katniss Evergreen, the central character of the first ‘Hunger Games’ films, took ‘Riple’y as a direct reference and model for her personification. Kate Beckinsale, central figure of the films Underworldalso calls herself “Sigourney Beaver” as a sign of admiration for Weaver’s work as a heroine, and Charlize Theron, star of the last stage of Mad Maxsaid it would be “very remiss” to ignore everything Weaver did to build the current image we have of a full-fledged cinematic heroine.

Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), Emily Blunt (On the edge of tomorrow), Amy Adams (the arrival), again Lawrence (Passengers), Jessica Chastain (rescue mission) and Sandra Bullock (Gravity) represented over time different variants of the same type of central female character with heroic traits in fantastic, futuristic or science fiction stories. Each of them, in their own way, reflects the legacy that Weaver inaugurated playing Ripley.

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“I feel very flattered when my fellow actresses talk about ‘Ripley’”Weaver noted in 2017 while expressing his desire to return to embody his historic character on screen if the conditions were met to do so. “But I must above all recognize the work of the authors. When we made the sequels to ‘Alien’ I saw how difficult it was to write about a woman in such a direct, authentic, heroic and unsentimental way,” she added.

Two years before ‘Alien’‘the eighth passenger’, Weaver had an almost imperceptible appearance (barely six seconds in front of the camera) in Two strange lovers (1977), by Woody Allen. But in the memory of most of the public there was nothing in his career before Ripley. Rarely does an actress manage to make her first character in the cinema at the same time little less than her definitive one.

But much came later. Weaver filled his career with relevant appearances that decorated an exemplary career again and again.. He showed, for example, other (but much more earthly) variants of female heroism: The year we lived in danger, Gorillas in the Mist, Copycat-The imitator. And to them she added other unforgettable appearances, typical of an actress of infinite resources, in The Ghostbusters, Executive Secretary, President for a day, Death and the maiden either A monster came to see meand. The summary of all the facets of an exceptional career is the character that Cameron gave him in Avatar.

Weaver, 74, lives between New York (her hometown) and Santa Barbara, California, with author and theater director Jim Sampson., whom she married in 1984. Sigourney Weaver’s only wish is to grow old gracefully without letting some strange artifice alter the naturalness of her face and body. And she feels happy to have made a fundamental contribution so that women (especially heroines) are seen in cinema in a different way.