Shakespeare would have had a fine time with Sigourney Weaver: creating Viola and Beatrice with her in mind, collaborating with her on the odd comic masterpiece, vagabonding through London in some very comely company. Shaw would have been smitten by her combination of regal beauty and irreverent wit, of life force and light farce. The old Hollywood masters of penthouse comedy would have embraced this screwball Garbo, alive and kicking up her heels.
But this is 1986, when women on screen have been liberated from goddess-hood and turned into grunts. So Sigourney Weaver -- actor, playwright, bonne vivante, gun-control activist and, at a sensational 5 ft. 10 1/2 in., just possibly the world's most beautiful tall smart woman -- is striding toward stardom in her Marks & Spencer underwear and shouldering enough artillery to keep Caspar Weinberger happy till next Thursday. Aliens, indeed; has anyone thought of starring her in a movie called Humans?
Enough carping. In an age that rewards strength over grace, let there be women as strong as Weaver's Ripley. May homeless children have no less ferocious an adoptive mother; may extraterrestrial predators meet no less resourceful an antagonist. Trust that a million moviegoers will find the glamour beneath the smudged sweat on Ripley's face, and the feral humor in her challenge to Big Mama Alien: "Get away from her, you bitch!"
There is plenty to be grateful for in James Cameron's electrifying parable of two righteous single mothers, one an earthling in her mid-80s (after 57 years of floating in hypersleep), the other a mammoth uggy bug. Among these perks is a golden opportunity for Hollywood. It can finally discover in Weaver the stellar creature that Ivan Reitman, her director in Ghostbusters, has already proclaimed her: "the perfect contemporary heroine."
Perfect. Perfect has always been the problem. By today's movie conventions, Weaver, 36, is too gorgeous to be ordinary, too smart to be sexy, too sensible to be interesting. Hollywood lusts for the diseased oyster these days, not the pearl. And so, while notching a worthy stage career on Broadway (Hurlyburly) and in regional theater, Weaver has been placed in the cluttered corners of raucous comedies starring Saturday Night Live alumni (Ghostbusters, Deal of the Century) or at the cores of enigmatic dramas (Eyewitness, The Year of Living Dangerously). She is Dom Perignon in a town built to sell Dr Pepper. And she is too darn tall.
In Alien and its new sequel, Weaver has been able to commandeer center screen with a character she larkishly calls "Rambolina." Beneath the armor, though, she has found exotic soulmates: "I secretly structured myself to play Ripley like Henry V and like the women warriors of classic Chinese literature." Aliens was no take-the-money-and-run proposition (though she was paid $1 million, about 30 times her salary for the 1979 original). As Cameron remarks, "She's intensely prepared. Her copy of the script was marked with 17 different colors of ink. The margin notes were incredible: she got the dramatic significance of almost every line of dialogue and how each one might tie in with a later scene."