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Aliens reveals only flashes of Weaver's most distinctive gifts, but it has given her a powerful screen personality in a potential hit film. As Peter Weir, the Australian director of Living Dangerously, avers, "She is one of the few women who can light the screen up. I will be very happy to see her ^ running around in space fighting monsters." Perhaps the film's success will end Weaver's Hollywood runaround and give her an actor-producer's clout. And then beware. Sophisticated romances, wry talkfests, even a musical -- Sigourney the star has surprises in store.
That was so even before she called herself Sigourney. Susan was the name chosen by her parents Elizabeth Inglis, a British stage actress, and Sylvester Weaver, famous as "Pat" when he was president of NBC in the 1950s. The Weavers lived in a Sutton Place apartment once owned by Marion Davies; Sigourney remembers swinging on the golden gates leading to the living room. "I was a privileged, pampered, sheltered child," she says of this Wasp gentility. "It was as though every day had a happy ending. My brother Trajan and I had gold cards giving us the run of Radio City Music Hall. I thought everyone's father was head of a network. Though it made things confusing when I was learning the alphabet -- how did it begin, ABC or NBC?"
Her artistic favorites were rats (The Nutcracker Suite), mice (Walt Disney's Cinderella), whales (John Huston's Moby Dick) and the sexual cannibals of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, which so seized her imagination that, she says, "my parents were afraid I'd try to eat someone on the beach." In fact, her mother had a deeper fear: "From the moment she was born I was scared stiff she'd turn to acting." Not at first. But there was an irrepressible flair for the dramatic. At 14, Susan read The Great Gatsby and dubbed herself Sigourney (after the unseen aunt of Gatsby's sleek-snob lady friend Jordan Baker). "I was so tall," Weaver declares, "and Susan was such a short name. To my ear Sigourney was a stage name -- long and curvy, with a musical ring." For nearly a year after this self-baptism, her parents called her simply S, just in case the girl changed her mind, and her name, again.
The name stayed; the enthusiasms wandered. One year she made her society debut: "I thought of myself as an ugly duckling, tall and shy, and for that coming-out party I had turned into a tiny swan." The next year she was in Israel telling her mom, "I want to stay and help." Recalls Elizabeth: "This was at a stage when she wouldn't make her bed. But she had the Sigourney Serious Look -- and when you see it, you act." Now the Wasp princess trades in her deb gown for khaki and operates the potato-peeling machine at the Hill of Isaac Kibbutz. "I tried to improve the machine's performance, and for a $ while it did work faster. So fast that it blew up. The supervisor said I was a humiliation to the Jewish race." That adventure ended in three weeks.