Word: weaverization
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...Alien and its new sequel, Weaver has been able to commandeer center screen with a character she larkishly calls "Rambolina." Beneath the armor, though, she has found exotic soulmates: "I secretly structured myself to play Ripley like Henry V and like the women warriors of classic Chinese literature." Aliens was no take-the-money-and-run proposition (though she was paid $1 million, about 30 times her salary for the 1979 original). As Cameron remarks, "She's intensely prepared. Her copy of the script was marked with 17 different colors of ink. The margin notes were incredible...
Aliens reveals only flashes of Weaver's most distinctive gifts, but it has given her a powerful screen personality in a potential hit film. As Peter Weir, the Australian director of Living Dangerously, avers, "She is one of the few women who can light the screen up. I will be very happy to see her ^ running around in space fighting monsters." Perhaps the film's success will end Weaver's Hollywood runaround and give her an actor-producer's clout. And then beware. Sophisticated romances, wry talkfests, even a musical -- Sigourney the star has surprises in store...
That was so even before she called herself Sigourney. Susan was the name chosen by her parents Elizabeth Inglis, a British stage actress, and Sylvester Weaver, famous as "Pat" when he was president of NBC in the 1950s. The Weavers lived in a Sutton Place apartment once owned by Marion Davies; Sigourney remembers swinging on the golden gates leading to the living room. "I was a privileged, pampered, sheltered child," she says of this Wasp gentility. "It was as though every day had a happy ending. My brother Trajan and I had gold cards giving us the run of Radio...
...scared stiff she'd turn to acting." Not at first. But there was an irrepressible flair for the dramatic. At 14, Susan read The Great Gatsby and dubbed herself Sigourney (after the unseen aunt of Gatsby's sleek-snob lady friend Jordan Baker). "I was so tall," Weaver declares, "and Susan was such a short name. To my ear Sigourney was a stage name -- long and curvy, with a musical ring." For nearly a year after this self-baptism, her parents called her simply S, just in case the girl changed her mind, and her name, again...
...here is La Pasionaria Sigourney, set to exhort the students with quotations from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. But it is missing from her tote bag. She grabs her address book (same size, same color) and waves it above her head, declaiming her memorized Mao. "They responded wildly," Weaver recalls, "and we marched off to the ROTC building and set it afire...