Sigourney Weaver, the actress who turned Ripley into a question rather than an answer

The character is so dense with meaning that for forty-seven years critics have used her as a noun. Ripley — the warrant officer who walks out of the wreck of the Nostromo and refuses to die for anyone’s convenience — became the unit of measurement for a certain kind of female screen presence. The actress who built her has spent every decade since trying to make sure the unit does not calcify. Sigourney Weaver does not own a museum to Ellen Ripley. She owns a series of small, deliberate detours away from her.

The most recent of those detours is the most improbable. In The Mandalorian and Grogu, in cinemas worldwide from May 22, Weaver plays Colonel Ward of the New Republic’s Adelphi Rangers — a former Rebel Alliance pilot who sends Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian into the Outer Rim. She has never been in a Star Wars picture. She is 76. Her one negotiated condition for taking the part, she told the BBC, was a scene with Grogu: she had to share the frame with Baby Yoda or there was no point being there. Jon Favreau wrote her one in which Grogu tries to steal her food.

Susan Alexandra Weaver was born in Manhattan, the daughter of Pat Weaver — the NBC executive who invented The Today Show and ran the network through the mid-1950s — and the English actress Elizabeth Inglis. At fourteen, having grown to her full five-foot-eleven, she decided that Susan was a name too short for her body and lifted Sigourney off a minor character in The Great Gatsby. She went to Stanford for an English degree and then to Yale’s School of Drama, where her classmates included Meryl Streep and Christopher Durang and where she appeared in Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs in 1974. A speaking line in Annie Hall followed in 1977 — she is Alvy Singer’s date outside a cinema, and it lasts about three seconds.

Two years later Ridley Scott cast her as the warrant officer on the Nostromo and the rest of the seventies disappeared. What Alien did, then what James Cameron’s Aliens did seven years later, was insist that a woman could carry a horror film and an action film without becoming either the final girl or the love interest. Ripley loaded the pulse rifle herself. Weaver got an Academy Award nomination for the sequel — still, decades later, the sole genre-picture Best Actress nomination most critics can name without looking it up.

Then she refused to stay there. Ghostbusters in 1984 made her a comedic foil for Bill Murray. In 1988 she landed two Academy Award nominations in the same ceremony — Best Actress for Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist and Best Supporting Actress for Mike Nichols’s Working Girl, the office comedy in which she plays the boss who steals her assistant’s idea. She lost both Oscars on the same night and won the corresponding Golden Globes. The decade that followed put her with auteurs: Roman Polanski for Death and the Maiden in 1994, Ang Lee for The Ice Storm in 1997 — the BAFTA for that one — Jean-Pierre Jeunet for Alien: Resurrection, and Dean Parisot for Galaxy Quest, the picture that quietly argues she is also a great comic actress.

The Oscar she never received is the easy critical talking point about her career. It is not the interesting one. The interesting one is what she did with the certainty of being passed over. After 1988 she stopped competing for the prestige roles and started accepting parts that other major actresses would not touch — the mother in Galaxy Quest whose sole joke is having her dress digested by an alien, the morally ambiguous narrator in James Cameron’s Avatar, the live-action middle-aged actress who agreed, fourteen years later, to play a fourteen-year-old Na’vi adolescent in motion capture for Avatar: The Way of Water and again for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Cameron’s argument — that the technology now lets a face act independent of the body that hosts it — was an experiment Weaver agreed to be the test case for. Critics noticed the kiss scene with Jack Champion. They missed that the experiment worked.

The other late-career pivot was theatre. In December 2024 she opened in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of The Tempest at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, playing Prospero — the role traditionally assigned to a senior male actor. It was her West End debut. It was also the first Shakespeare production the Drury Lane had staged since Peter Brook directed John Gielgud in the same play in 1957. She received the International Goya in 2024 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 81st Venice Film Festival the same year. Lifetime-achievement awards usually arrive as exit signage. Hers arrived in the middle of a calendar that included an Apple TV+ thriller, a Star Wars debut, an Avatar sequel and a confirmed return to narrate Avatar 4 in 2029.

Weaver married the theatre director Jim Simpson in 1984 and they have one child, who teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts. She is honorary chair of the Explorers Club and a long-standing patron of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the work that took her to Rwanda in 1987 outlasting the film that put her there. She tends to speak about her own career with the slight bemusement of someone who is still surprised she got to do this for a living.

What comes next is, characteristically, not a tidy summation. Phoebe Waller-Bridge announced in January that Weaver had taken a key role in the Amazon series adaptation of Tomb Raider alongside Jason Isaacs. Avatar 4, scheduled for 2029, will be narrated by Kiri — the role she has now played in three films and intends to play in two more. The actress who invented Ellen Ripley in 1979 has spent half a century declining to settle into the version of herself that the studio system kept offering. She is, on present evidence, not finished refusing.