Actress Sigourney Weaver walked into the suite of a Manhattan hotel for an interview, the very embodiment of her screen image: Neatly cropped dark brown hair drew attention to her wide face. A form-hugging, off-the-shoulder dress emphasized her imposing physique. At five feet eleven inches tall, Weaver makes no attempt to minimize her height and happily draws attention to her three-inch heels.
The public persona is in place: the self-confident gaze and an intelligent and privileged demeanor, sort of an ad for the Yale School of Drama, of which she is a graduate.
Sigourney Weaver, 42, is the embodiment of feminist strength, an image fed by some of her film roles-the relentless warrior of the “Alien” trilogy and the fearless but isolated protector of “Gorillas In the Mist.”
Stately, regal, imposing, gutsy, classy: This is how most filmgoers see her. To hear colleagues, there’s another side.
“She’s actually very wacky and she certainly doesn’t take being a star seriously,” says scriptwriter Gary Ross, who created her latest role, in “Dave.” “I find her very at ease with herself and very unobsessed about her fame.”
The most surprising thing about interviewing Weaver is how quick she is to laugh. She says she would have loved to have played more self-effacing comedy. (One of her best-known roles was in the hit comedy “Ghostbusters.”)
“There have been comic roles I would have liked but I think they all went to men,” she says. “I really like people like Steve Martin, I just love it when people are ridiculous and irreverent, but it seems to be very much a male kind of thing in this country.
Weaver is a top-grossing female actress, according to industry reports: Her films’ average opening weekend sales over the past seven years have totaled some $15.2 million. She has been widely quoted as questioning the male domination of Hollywood and the studio system. In reflection, however, she suggests that women actresses aren’t alone in their difficulties.
“I’ve spat out my little vitriol as my contribution to what’s being said, but I think it’s slim pickings for guys too,” Weaver says. “Men are getting offered more roles statistically, but in fact few of them are interesting roles. I’m sure it’s just as hard for Kevin Costner and Michael Douglas to find interesting projects as it is for Meryl Streep and Jodie Foster. I think we’re all in the same boat.
“I don’t think Hollywood has ever really taken good care of women, but at least now they aren’t telling us who to go out with and what to wear.”
In the recently released “Dave,” Weaver costars opposite Kevin Kline. She plays the wife of an autocratic president of the United States who is secretly replaced by a sensitive and caring look-alike, both played by Kline. In the film, which suggests decent men don’t have to finish last, Weaver’s character finds her bitter marriage transformed by the gentle imposter.
“I think my character in `Dave’ has more in common with the previous first lady, although I think she’d like to be like Hillary Clinton, in a real partnership,” says Weaver. “I wanted people to see this character as a human being who is trapped in the White House in this uncomfortable role..
“It’s sad because most first ladies always have had a lot of input but they have had to disguise it.America always has had this strange idea that the president’s wife must be the perfect model of femininity and discretion. I think this is one of the reasons why we don’t have a woman president, because we are constantly seeing these silent, polite, self-effacing women who tiptoe around behind their husbands. It’s a very old-fashioned picture of American womanhood.”
Weaver makes no secret of her admiration for Hillary Rodham Clinton and the climate of power-sharing in the White House.
“I think she’s great. After reading so much about the first ladies for this film and how they all tried to give the impression that they are just these wives, it’s good that Clinton is upfront about the fact that she’s bright and very capable and has her own personal and political agenda. I think it’s about time that happened.
“Our attitude toward her is antiquated. We expect the first lady to be hostess for the country, not really a person. We don’t expect her to express her views, especially if they are at odds with the president’s. I think it’s wonderful that there’s a real person in there with real opinions.”
In her own career, Weaver has sought more hands-on control. Five years ago she set up her own production company in New York, Goat Cay, which has several film projects in development.
“I meet a lot of very talented writers in New York theater and I just thought it would be great to get that type of writing and material into films, which tend to be very conventional and not really in touch with life. That’s the purpose of this company, more than just to get roles for myself.”
Among Weaver’s production projects: a comedy about parental images, “Then She Found Me”; a thriller, “Black Lizard,” by Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima; and an oddball comedy about handling success called “Dear Rosie,” by June Roberts, who wrote “Mermaids.”
If Weaver now is in a position to pursue personal projects, it’s probably because she has paid her dues. Reportedly she commands up to $5 million per role.
“With every picture you do, you then tend to get offered more roles like that,” she says. “After the success of `Working Girl’ (in which she played the hard-driven boss to actress Melanie Griffith’s ladder-climbing character), I think I was sent every funny bitch role. Sometimes they send me scripts about these women who are so unpleasant. After Ripley (her character in the `Alien’ series) every time there was a real ballbreaker they’d send (the script) to me.”
She says the two roles that have most affected her were in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” in which she played a British embassy attache in Indonesia during the early ’60s (“I’m very proud of that; I think it’s my favorite,” she says) and “Gorillas in the Mist,” in which she played the late anthropologist Dian Fossey, who devoted two decades to studying the mountain gorillas of Rwanda.
“Gorillas” was about “the destruction of nature and the destruction of the quality of life, she says. “I’m not a brave person at all, but making that film was heavenly. I’m really the biggest coward in real life; I scream when I see a cockroach, but I always thought Dian Fossey wanted this picture made and she was looking after me.”
Weaver received a Golden Globe award for best actress for the role and also an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1989, the same year she was nominated for best supporting actress for “Working Girl.”
Today, Weaver says she doesn’t see setting up her own production company as a kind of snub of the studio system.
Actresses are setting up companies, she says, “because we are interested in developing stories. I don’t think it’s about some last-ditch effort to survive in Hollywood. . . . Maybe we’ll be in them and maybe we won’t.”
The daughter of English stage actress Desiree Weaver and American television executive Pat Weaver, she attended private schools in New York and then earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from Stanford University and a master of arts from the Yale School of Drama.
Her first professional job was as an understudy in Sir John Gielgud’s 1977 production of “The Constant Wife,” starring Ingrid Bergman. Weaver shed her given first name, Susan, and adopted the stage name, Sigourney, which was taken from a male character in “The Great Gatsby.” Weaver did off-Broadway stage work before her film debut in 1979 in the hit film, “Alien.”
Home is still New York, where she and husband Jim Simpson, a theater director, maintain an apartment, as well as a rural hideway upstate. Three years ago, daughter Charlotte was born.
Weaver says being a mother has introduced some changes into her work. “I was with my daughter for a full year before I had to go back to work and it has made me more lazy and less inclined to be uprooted for three months to do a picture.”
Weaver says she doesn’t envision any problems when her daughter is old enough to understand the film roles she has played.
“As much as I love my daughter I don’t think the roles I’ve done are any of her business. She has to respect what I did, when I did it. My big problem is trying to justify working as much as I might like to now that I’m a mother. I had to do one film a year-you have to live and earn. I know I did `Half Moon Street’ and yes, I know I took my top off, I don’t think that will be a problem. But I’m glad I haven’t done a film in which I murder children or something awful.”
Weaver says she considers herself a feminist.”I’m not an activist really,” she explains. “I have some strong views. I’m pro-choice and I’m concerned about the lack of funding for AIDS research. The only really good thing about being a celebrity is being able to put your weight behind certain issues… I do a few things, but if I got involved in everything I’d have to give up my career.
“I’m actually not very good about being a movie star. When you are working on films there is no such thing as being a star anyway. You’re just part of the company and some of you are behind the cameras and some of you are in front.
“In public I tend to slink around with my head down,” she laughs. “The paparazzi never take any mind of me anyway.”
