Sigourney Weaver

Sigourney Weaver is a Generator — built for the long, satisfying haul of committing deeply to work she loves, and her fifty-year career is exactly that: one deep dive after another, from Ripley to Dian Fossey to Grace Augustine. She was born Susan Alexandra Weaver, daughter of NBC president Pat Weaver, and by fourteen she'd renamed herself after a minor Gatsby character. That renaming is telling — a girl already exercising the instinct to spot what deserves to endure and what needs to change, even about her own name.

At 5'11", she was told repeatedly at Yale Drama School that she had no future as an actress. She graduated anyway and spent years in downtown New York theater, workshopping plays with Christopher Durang, writing satirical revues, taking whatever off-Broadway parts came. Her 1/3 profile, designed to build expertise through trial and error, turned those years of rejection and small parts into foundation. When Ridley Scott's Alien came in 1979, she was almost thirty and had exactly one film credit — six seconds in Annie Hall. She read for Ripley and something in her body said yes; it was the kind of clarity her gut delivered without needing a resume to back it up.

Ripley became one of cinema's first fully-realized action heroines partly because Weaver refused to play her as anyone's idea of a woman in space. She fought for Ripley's intelligence, her fury, her tenderness toward the cat and toward Newt. By Aliens she was co-writing scenes with James Cameron and earning an Oscar nomination in a genre picture — a fight worth having because the character mattered. She has said she doesn't seek out strong women roles; she seeks out real ones, and then makes them strong.

In 1988 she did something almost no actress had done: two Oscar nominations in the same year, for Working Girl and Gorilla's in the Mist. To play Dian Fossey she lived among mountain gorillas in Rwanda for months, the kind of full-immersion research most stars would delegate to a coach. She's since spoken about environmental protection with the same steady authority Fossey had — a voice that carries because it's built on lived experience, not talking points. Friends describe her as intensely private between projects, disappearing into her marriage to director Jim Simpson and raising their daughter Charlotte in a Manhattan life almost entirely off the tabloid grid.

She has a comedian's timing that surprises people who only know her as Ripley — Ghostbusters, Galaxy Quest, Death and the Maiden all show a woman genuinely delighted by the range of things she gets to try. In her seventies she filmed Avatar sequels for James Cameron underwater, playing a fourteen-year-old Na'vi girl, learning to freedive for minutes at a time. Most actresses her age are being handed grandmother roles; she was training as a teenager. It's a good picture of how her career has actually worked: waiting for the thing that lights her up, then bringing everything she has to it, and treating every new part as its own beginning rather than a continuation of a brand.

She has said the best thing about her work is that she gets to keep learning. A career built on periodic retreat, careful reflection, and then returning with something worth saying — which is exactly how the woman formerly known as Susan built the actress the world came to know as Sigourney.