77 Years Ago, Sci-Fi’s Biggest Star Was Born & Her Most Iconic Role Was Actually A Late-Game Casting Change

Today marks the 77th birthday of one of the greatest actresses of all time. If there were a sci-fi actor Mt. Rushmore, her face would be carved into South Dakota’s Black Hills. Before becoming a sci-fi icon, she was a Stanford English major who lived in a tree house and attended class dressed like an elf. Her acting troupe would stage plays anywhere they could find an audience, from coffee shops to abandoned warehouses. When she attended Yale, she had hoped to truly master her craft, but was faced with a teaching staff that undervalued her. The six-foot oddball didn’t let that stop her. She pursued theatrical work Off-Broadway in New York. It’s there that she would be discovered for her first feature film role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. But the role that would make her a household name would come soon after.

The household name we speak of is, of course, Sigourney Weaver. A true baby boomer, she was born Oct. 8th, 1949, to WWII naval vet Pat Weaver and his wife, British Actress Elizabeth Inglis. Weaver created The Today Show before he became President of NBC in 1953. He then created the Tonight Show format, launching late-night TV as we know it. His daughter would find stardom without his help, thanks to a film role the studio didn’t want her for.

Ridley Scott’s Alien had already begun prepping production and building sets, but he couldn’t find an actress to star in the sci-fi horror hybrid. Fox wanted a big name for the role. Weaver said as much once, “[Ridley] fought hard for me because the studio didn’t want an unknown in the part.” The studio had wanted Weaver’s Yale classmate Meryl Streep, but according to Scott, he felt it was bad timing as Streep’s partner John Cazale had just passed away. Eventually, with shooting mere weeks away, the studio relented and let the filmmaker cast Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, warrant officer of the Nostromo.

Ellen Ripley Changed Sci-Fi Forever

Alien was released May 25th, 1979, and became a box-office hit. Weaver’s Ripley was more than just the final-girl victim. The character was a practical and able-minded officer. If the rest of the crew had listened to her, the movie would have been called Nostromo Returns to Earth Safely. Seven years later, she would return to the character for director James Cameron’s Aliens, forming a lifelong friendship that would result in her being cast in Avatar, first as Dr. Grace Augustine, and later as teenage Na’vi Kiri. Cameron’s vision took Ripley’s competence and turned it up to eleven, creating a new type of action hero, the furious mother with a flamethrower.

She would revisit Ripley two more times before letting the franchise move on without her. After surviving Hadley’s Hope in Aliens, Alien 3 would crash-land her on a prison colony with a new type of xenomorph, under the direction of David Fincher, before he was allowed to be David Fincher. The troubled production was intended to be Weaver’s last outing as Ellen Ripley and even gave her a dramatic death.

Sci-fi and box-office profits will always trump a death scene, though, as Weaver came back for Alien Resurrection with specific requests. Since she was returning as a clone of Ellen Ripley with Xenomorph DNA, Weaver pushed screenwriter Joss Whedon to make her weirder and include a love scene between Ripley 8 and a Xenomorph. James Cameron jokingly acknowledged Weaver had suggested a Xenomorph sex scene back during Aliens. Resurrection tried to make that happen, but the studio cut it short to just a Xenomorph warrior caressing Ripley 8 as it takes her to their Queen. Whedon wrote five different endings for the film, trying to balance Weaver, Jeunet, and the studio’s budgetary restraints. When asked for a director’s cut for a box set re-release, Jean Pierre said on the commentary track, “This is my director’s cut.”

Alien Resurrection also features Sigourney Weaver somehow making an impressive no-look behind-the-back basketball shot. Here’s a behind-the-scenes clip showing off Weaver’s basketball skills:

Sigourney Weaver Was Never Just Ellen Ripley

Sigourney Weaver’s legacy in sci-fi has grown beyond Ellen Ripley. The actress charmed the world as Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters in 1984. A cellist whose apartment building is a focal point for ancient energies, she mostly plays the straight person to Bill Murray’s antics, but the film wouldn’t work without her. Weaver would return to the series in Ghostbusters 2 and make a brief cameo in Afterlife. She continued flexing her comedy muscles in a loving tribute to Star Trek, playing Gwen DeMarco in 1999’s Galaxy Quest. Her character portrayed Lieutenant Tawny Madison on the fictional show, whose primary role was repeating what the ship’s computer was saying. The actress who trailblazed smarter roles for women in sci-fi was playing someone frustrated by how little her own series let her contribute. By far her most meta movie moment.

Weaver’s legacy has now become part of her charm on screen. Her villainous turn in Netflix’s Marvel series The Defenders channelled the essence of her Working Girl character Katharine Parker. Though instead of stealing Melanie Griffith’s ideas, she runs the Hand. As the director in Cabin in the Woods, you don’t see her much, but when she does finally show up, her presence is commanding. Viewers recognize the history and let it give the character more weight, so the movie doesn’t have to slow down to explain her. When she appears as a New Republic Colonel in The Mandalorian and Grogu, you buy in because it’s Sigourney F’n Weaver. Though her reasoning for taking that role was sound: “I get to have scenes with a little Grogu, which is probably why I did the movie.”

In Galaxy Quest, she may have talked to the computer, but Sigourney Weaver is so ubiquitous to sci-fi that now she is the computer. She has provided the voice for spaceships in both Wall-E and Futurama. But even in voice work, she returned to the role that made her career. In 2014, she returned to voice Ellen Ripley for the game Alien: Isolation, Nostromo Edition. The bonus mission reunited the original cast aboard the Nostromo, giving players a chance to succeed where the crew had failed.

The studio cast Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley when it originally wanted a bankable star. Since Alien, Sigourney Weaver has eighteen sci-fi projects to her name, including the 2nd-biggest box-office hit of all time, Avatar. Meryl Streep has done one, and calling it sci-fi is a stretch. She appeared as the Chief Elder in 2014’s The Giver. Sigourney Weaver is sci-fi royalty, and she got there by being a queen slayer. Happy 77th birthday, Sigourney Weaver!