Sigourney Weaver plays an autistic woman in her latest film. She tells Donald Clarke how her childhood helped her to get into the character
Could Sigourney Weaver have become a proper movie star if her career had begun in today's Hollywood? She could certainly have made it as one of those classy character actors - Allison Janney, Patricia Clarkson - who secure leads in independent films and supporting roles as acerbic aunts in mainstream fare. But the pneumatic demands of contemporary magazine covers might well have made it difficult for somebody with such a distinctive appearance to succeed. Jessica Alba would surely be deemed likely to sell more copies of Loaded.
None of which is to suggest that she does not look fabulous. Sitting rigidly upright in a hotel room in Berlin, Weaver, now 56, wears the dignified demeanour of one of Henry James's less psychologically conflicted heroines.
Yet for all her apparent confidence, Weaver, (born Susan Alexandra Weaver - she borrowed her Christian name from a character in The Great Gatsby), still claims to suffer from shyness and lack of self-esteem.
It is over a quarter of a century since we first encountered her evading an entity from beyond the stars in Alien. Such successes as Ghost Busters, Working Girl and The Ice Storm followed. Next week we see her playing a bereaved autistic woman in Marc Evans's Snow Cake.
But Weaver, the daughter of a prominent television executive and a distinguished English actress, claims her uncomfortable adolescence continues to define her personality. At the age of 11 she already stood 5ft 10in tall.
"Yes, I was very tall when I was young," she says. "But I think that helped me with the part in Snow Cake. It helps that I know what it feels to be regarded as slightly freakish. For years I was very self-conscious. I knew what it was like to have people look at me all the time."
Surely, having been nominated for three Oscars and having become the subject of a million science fiction fanatics' sexual fantasies, she must have shaken off that early clumsy self-consciousness.
"You never quite get over it," she says sadly. "Now, my daughter is 15 and she seems quite confident and well adjusted in comparison to me and my friends. I felt like a giant spider whenever I walked into the room. Adolescence can be so uncomfortable and then, in response, I became a sort of a clown. I guess that is how a lot of people react. They become the clown and get people to laugh at them."
SIGOURNEY WEAVER, BORN in New York city but raised in San Francisco and Connecticut, was sufficiently proficient at the clowning to suspect that acting might suit her as a profession. But that shyness restrained her from announcing such an extravagant ambition. She initially studied English literature at Stanford and did a few plays on the side. Then, eventually facing the inevitable, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. She has little positive to say about her time at that august institution. It seems nobody there acknowledged her talent.
"That was how it seemed," she says. "I ended up staying with it out of spite. But I think I have forgiven them now. I have met so many people who have similar stories from drama school and art school. They try and break people down. They try and harden them by telling them they are no good. I was looking for a role model and hoping for encouragement. If you leave yourself open like that it invites cruelty and contempt from the academics."
She goes on to explain that at college she found herself constantly cast in parts she would never have taken in the real world: "Prostitutes and old women, that sort of thing." But life improved when she graduated and made her way to New York. Weaver rapidly found herself securing regular work on the stage. Eventually, having not quite come clean up to this point, she told her parents she intended to purse a career as an actress.
"I think they already knew," she laughs. "They said: 'We figured that, dear, when we had to pay for drama school.' " Weaver says that she has forgiven the teachers at Yale, but hints of bitterness still creep into her conversation. Securing her first big film role was, it seems, an opportunity for revenge.
"I would have preferred being in the marines to college. That would have been better training, frankly. I was never offered the roles I needed. Then when I got cast as Ripley in Alien I was more aware that this was my big chance. I had to grab it."
The part of Ripley, warrant officer on a deep-space tug harbouring a voracious extraterrestrial, was originally written with a man in mind. Her casting was surprising for a number of other reasons. A tiny cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall aside, she had no real experience in cinema. She was already approaching 30. And, to this point, she had pursued mainly comic roles. The latter point seems slightly surprising now. Despite fine performances in comedies such as Working Girl and Galaxy Quest, we tend to think of Sigourney Weaver as a big, serious actress. Don't we?
"I know. That is the impression," she says "Maybe that's because I was so shy I ended up looking really serious all the time and Ripley, of course, is such a straight arrow. It is her purity of approach that made her special. But she is also as different from me as it is possible to get. Then again, how could people know that? In public I am rarely myself. It takes years to learn to be yourself in public life. I am much better at that now."
So, if grim Ripley is so different from Weaver - who, it has to be said, doesn't seem all that frivolous or light-hearted - how did she go about creating the character?
"I picked somebody I knew very well to be my Ripley," she says. "Somebody who is very much about the here and the now. She would never worry too much about 'Oh, if I do this what will I then do if that happens?' Very much the right person to have there if your plane goes into a dive. I would be screaming: 'Oh, God no. We're all going to die!' "
Ripley, later to reappear in three sequels of varying quality, rapidly became a feminist icon and helped secure Weaver a place in the Hollywood citadel. She now lives in New York with her husband, the theatre director Jim Simpson, and their daughter, Charlotte.
Impressively, working in a business that often discards female actors when they reach 35, she has managed to secure interesting roles well into middle age. In 1997 she bravely donned 1970s slacks to play the troubled wife and mother in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Two years later she was hilarious in Galaxy Quest, a first-rate spoof of Star Trek.
"Living in New York, I think I am somewhat protected from the ageism of Hollywood," she explains. "One of the reasons that I don't focus on it too much is that I get sent more interesting scripts now than I did in my 30s. But I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way. But I am still sent more good things than bad, and the good stuff is mainly independent. I am amazed that the mainstream hasn't picked up on the fact that people don't want to hear their stories."
SNOW CAKE, THOUGH sentimental at times, is certainly not a product of the mainstream. Marc Evans's picture, set in Canada, details the platonic relationship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a stranger (Alan Rickman) who turns up to inform her that her daughter has been killed in a traffic accident.
How accurate is her representation of autism I wonder.
"It was such a big subject it took me about nine months to zero in on someone to copy. There are some things that people with autism share and in this case, like a surprising number of autistic people, she was very verbal. People think that autism is not verbal and often it is. People think if you behave in an autistic fashion you are not smart and that is just not the case."
Those of us ignorant about autism might assume an actor playing somebody with the condition might have a more limited emotional spectrum to work with. Is this the case? "Well you can't generalise. But the emotion they have is often fear. And they tend to have fear when things overwhelm them. They then go into survival mode. They sometimes think our interest in emotions is hilarious. They think we waste so much time on them when we could be playing."
Weaver has done an impressive job of stretching her talent in recent years. But somehow she cannot quite escape Ripley. Though there is no immediate prospect of a fifth Alien film coming our way, she still makes a point of explaining that - with the right script and the right director - the franchise could be reinvigorated. She must, surely, occasionally wish she could escape the character that made her famous.
"If I had not been able to move on I might have felt that," she says. "If people had not sent me interesting scripts, if I had not got to do a film like Snow Cake, then I think I might resent Ripley. Actually I might be in constant therapy."
Snow Cake is on limited release