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All of which makes for a fearsome CV, but Weaver bristles at the notion that she is just good at playing strong women. “The one area I feel very comfortable in is comedy.” She can point to the two Ghostbusters films, as well as Galaxy Quest, Heartbreakers and the recent Tadpole as proof of that, while in 1989, the year she was nominated for Gorillas in the Mist, she picked up a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination for her role as a bitchy boss in the comedy Working Girl. Weaver failed to win either of them.

“I’m rather proud that I was the first person to lose twice in one night. It’s quite an accomplishment,” she jokes. “What was funny was that I felt there should be a losers’ room, where we could all go and curse and smoke and drink whisky, because people were so afraid that you just wouldn’t be able to get out of your chair that they didn’t know what to say to you. They were like: ‘You must be so heartbroken.’ I was surprised to be there at all.”

Born Susan Weaver, she adopted Sigourney in her teens; she grew up in New York and originally wanted to be a journalist. “It’s sort of the same essence as acting,” she notes. “You’re looking for a good story.” But her English mother, from Colchester, had been an actress in the 1930s — she pops up in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, as one of the villain’s daughters — while her father was president of the NBC TV network in the 1950s. He invented the “presenter behind the desk, guest on the sofa” format that’s now standard on nearly all chat shows. So, show business was in her blood. “I was quite shy as a kid, so my parents were surprised when I became an actor,” recalls Weaver. “My dad wasn’t very keen. He used to call it The Racket, and even to the end of his life, he ’d say: ‘Is the film commercial? Do you know what you’re doing?’” But since Alien, she has never had to struggle for work. “I’ve been lucky enough not to need to tell my agent: ‘I want to do this.’ There’s always something unexpected coming up.”

Moving between indie projects such as the forthcoming Imaginary Heroes, blockbusters such as the Alien and Ghostbusters series, and art-house movies like The Year of Living Dangerously and The Ice Storm, Weaver seems determined to avoid being pinned down. Her most recent film, Holes, is a case in point: it is a bizarre, cultish movie in which she plays the superintendent of a camp for unruly kids whom she forces to dig holes in the desert. She is currently filming The Village, the latest chiller from M Knight Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense).

Now 54, she does not want her epitaph just to say “RIPley”. “I don’t know how much one needs to be remembered at all, but if I am, then I’d like to be remembered as someone who played all sorts of parts. I noticed a few years ago that I was jumping from comedy to horror to drama and back. But I don’t want to be remembered just for Ripley and, thanks to DVDs and videos, all the movies I have done will stick around.”

Nevertheless, the New York-based Weaver is used to being stopped in the street and asked whether she will play Ripley for a fifth time. A spin-off, Alien v Predator, is currently shooting, but she wanted nothing to do with it. Instead, she’d like to work with Ridley Scott again. “I don’t know if anything will happen, but we have talked about it,” admits Weaver. “It would be fun to be her again. Yeah, I’m dying to get away into the solar system.”

Holes opens on Friday; Alien: The Director’s Cut on Oct 31

Watch the trailer for Holes on October’s The Month CD-Rom

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