Sigourney Weaver is an American actress internationally acclaimed for her portrayals of strong, action-oriented, and independent female characters. The daughter of television executive Pat Weaver and English actress Elizabeth Inglis, she was born Susan Alexandra Weaver in New York City in 1949. After earning an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University, Weaver studied drama at Yale and participated in many stage plays before making her cinematic debut as a walk-on in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). Her breakthrough came two years later, thanks to the role that came to define her career and the iconic science-fiction saga at large, that is the resourceful heroine of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Her performance of Ellen Ripley, which she embodied in several sequels of the franchise, redefined the action heroine archetype and cemented her place in cinema history. Weaver’s versatile career spans genres, including films like Avatar (2009), The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). In 2024, she was rewarded with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the Opening Ceremony of the Venice Film Festival.
