When Sigourney Weaver arrives in a penthouse hotel suite in Manhattan, she doesn’t look much like a trailblazer for her fellow actresses in Hollywood. Yes, she is tall and thin, but the lines on her face indicate that she has not succumbed to plastic surgery, like so many of her contemporaries, and she is dressed for comfort, in jeans and cowboy boots, rather than for show. More than anything, she gives the impression that she’s at ease with herself.

This is the woman who, with her tough but tender perfor-mance as Ripley in 1979’s Alien, virtually invented the concept of the female action star. Long before Uma Thurman swished her samurai sword in Kill Bill, Weaver was battling a giant extraterrestrial with acid for blood, as well as the prejudices of her male counterparts in space. And she did it without losing her femininity. There is even a maternal quality to Ripley that none of the violence of the four Alien films, or the shaven head she sported in Alien 3, can dispel.

Weaver, though, is reluctant to claim her place in history as one of the most significant screen icons of the past 25 years. “I’m not sure I know what being an icon means,” she says in her refined East Coast accent, “except that it means the character holds up, and I’m happy about that. I do appreciate her, though. You know, I’d been at drama school, envying all the men their Henry V parts, and I guess on some level this is my version of that. It’s set in the future, but who’s quibbling?” Ripley as a Shakespearian-style hero might be pushing it a little, but the release of Alien: The Director’s Cut later this month is a reminder not only of how effective a film the 1979 original was, but of just how influential Weaver’s performance has been. Linda Hamilton’s character in the first two Terminator films owed much to Ripley, while Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie, with the Charlie’s Angels and Tomb Raider movies respectively, are just the latest actresses to have tried their hand at being action women.

Before Alien came along, Weaver hadn’t shown up on Hollywood’s radar. She had spent most of her early career appearing in off-Broadway productions, and her film exper- ience amounted to a walk-on part in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Ridley Scott, who directed the film, had to fight to get her cast. “The studio were saying, ‘We don’t know, she hasn’t done any movies,’” recalls Scott, “but we did a test in London and then I flew to LA to show it to them. They brought in girls from the office to see what they thought, and they all raved about her.”

It was the first sign that Alien was going to change the way women were represented in the movies for ever.

Surprisingly, there was little debate about the fact that it would be Ripley, rather than one of the men in the cast, who would live to fight another day. “I don’t think Ridley and I realised that it would be interesting for a woman to be the lone survivor, we just felt it was true for her,” stresses Weaver. “She was just very strong and brave, and she looked after people. She’s straightforward, and I think she has the right stuff, the ability to think under pressure, that audiences respond to.”

She is too modest to claim any of those qualities for herself. “I’m not very Ripley-like in real life. I’m not really a strident person,” she says. The evidence, though, suggests otherwise. She introduced herself to her husband, the theatre director Jim Simpson, by asking him to dance, and as an English student at Stanford in the late 1960s, she demonstrated her independent streak by walking around campus in an elf costume and shunning college accommodation for life in a treehouse.

“Well, I sometimes dressed as an elf, but also as a tiger,” she grins. “My boyfriend at the time didn’t like his house, and I didn’t either, and we wanted to live in the tree, so we just decided to move out. But it wasn’t a house, there were no walls, it was just a platform. Luckily, we were in California.” Weaver also took part in numerous protests against the Vietnam war. “I couldn’t understand how some people could not be participating. For me, it was like doing your homework.”

Her activist past means that she looks for political resonances in her roles. “I guess I do see things sociologically, and one of the themes that keeps the Alien series going is that it’s about big business versus the little guy, the individual versus the group. To a lesser extent, it is about: ‘Don’t patronise me because I’m a woman.’ That’s a message that still needs to get out, but I think it is much less innovative now than it was in 1979.”

That high-minded approach meant that the more provocative elements of Alien, which have led some to say that it’s all about sex, passed her by at the time. “The alien did look like a big penis, and there are those big vagina things on the spaceship, the doors,” laughs Weaver. “But I just thought that was good fun, I didn’t look at it in Freudian terms. Maybe you have to be a guy to see that.”

It is perhaps no surprise that Weaver was more pre- occupied with her role, and the chance to establish herself as a movie actress, than with analysing the motives behind the production design. Her career had an unpromising start: she arrived at Yale Drama School in 1972, after graduating from Stanford, and found herself hampered by her height (she is 6ft 2in in high heels) and by the fact that Meryl Streep was in her class. “They weren’t very nice to her, either, but they kept telling me that I had no talent,” she shrugs.

By her own admission, she was “a very late bloomer”, so she disguised her natural affability behind a stern and serious front. “I was very earnest, but I had to struggle so hard that it was a long time before I was able to express my real sense of humour when I was working.”

Playing Ripley did not help diminish that perception of her, and she has since shown her steely side in plenty of roles. She earned her second best-actress Oscar nomination (the first was for 1986’s Aliens) for playing Dian Fossey, the woman who lived with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, in Gorillas in the Mist; took a protracted revenge on Ben Kingsley’s torturer in Death and the Maiden (1994); and was an unfaithful and utterly cold housewife in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm.

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