|
By John Esther
She played the courageous Dian Fossey in “Gorillas of the Mist.” She was the cutthroat executive, Katherine Parker, in “Working Girl.” She was a woman hell bent on revenge in “Death and the Maiden.” When they in “Half Moon Street” would not give Dr. Lauren Slaughter the respect at the office she deserved, she became a hooker in order to, finally, be in a position of power over men and money. She was Queen Isabella in “1492: Conquest of Paradise” and the First Lady in “Dave.”
More recently she was a journalist trying to give words to the sorrow of those firemen who lost their lives on Sept. 11 in “The Guys.”
Her character, Ellen Ripley in the “Alien” series ranks with the most famous action heroes ever created for the silver screen.
And though she is a multiple acting-award winner for both the stage and screen, Sigourney Weaver certainly has not had a flawless film career. But these roles -- along with Weaver’s in “Ice Storm,” “Tadpole,” “Ghostbusters” and “The Year of Living Dangerously” -- make up one the most respectful careers, in terms of talent and strong female roles, a woman has ever had.
“Part of it is that I’m 6’ tall and Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with [female] actors that are that tall,” quipped Weaver before becoming stern. “I think there’s some politics in the way I choose parts; basically I choose it for the story. But I don’t think I’d want to play a woman who didn’t make any sense. A woman who sees something and stands there screaming – although I did play one in ‘Galaxy Quest’ – but it depends. I have to find something believable; it’s a mysterious process. You bring yourself to the part and out of that you kind of create what you think is the truth. I do think that women are smart, are strong, are capable and we don’t give our selves much credit. So it’s always an interesting dynamic -- people who underestimate themselves who are forced to do things that are beyond them. I think that’s something that probably interests me about women.”
Born Susan Alexandra Weaver on Oct. 08, 1949, Weaver had a privileged upbringing Her father Sylvester “Pat” Weaver invented talk shows like the Tonight Show in 1952, pioneering the talk show format we see on late night TV. Her mother Elizabeth was a British actor who gave up acting to raise a family. Susan changed her name to Sigourney after a character called “Sigourney Howard” in Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby.”
Weaver started acting in 1965. She studied English at Stanford University where she picked up her Bachelor’s. After completing her studies in 1971, she did her Master’s at the Yale School of Drama in New York. In 1977, she was cast in her first film role as Alvy’s (Woody Allen) date outside the theater in “Annie Hall.”
Her newest role is in the Dan Harris film, “Imaginary Heroes.” Reminiscent of her performance as the free-floating bourgeois, Janey Carver, in “Ice Storm,” Weaver plays Sandy Travis, a woman bored to tears with suburbia. As Sandy is about to hit her mid-life crisis, her son, Matt (Kip Pardue), a local swimming hero, loses his life just as he is ascending to great heights.
“I really felt that even if her son hadn’t been lost at the beginning of this movie,” said Weaver, “that she still would have been entering the most raging mid-life crisis.”
Without any identity other than to be a suburban wife and mother with another dark secret to carry, Sandy moves closer to her and her husband, Ben’s (Jeff Daniels), remaining son, Tim (Emile Hirsch).
“She and Tim are kind of like two peas in a pod in a way. I think she dotes on him. Probably at the expense of the other son, but I think the other son kind of belongs to Jeff’s character,” said Weaver. “I don’t know how often that happens in marriage because I only have one child, but it seems to me that it’s probably not that unusual for certain children to gravitate toward one parent or the other ‘cause they’re more like them.”
Notwithstanding the extra children – the Travis family also has a daughter, Penny (Michelle Williams) – Weaver sees some similarities between the law breaking, child threatening Sandy and herself.
“Well, I’m pretty mischievous. I hate conformity. I couldn’t live in the suburbs for a second. But I’m much more subterranean than she is. It’s hard to say. Sometimes I feel I really don’t have an identity,” Weaver said with a chuckle. “But I think that I’m more shy than Sandy. Maybe she’s [surer] of her convictions? She’s sure that she was right not to talk to her husband about what happened and things like that. I don’t think I’m ever that sure. So I think she has more certainty, but, in this case, she’s wrong [laughs]. I think it takes her, them, all a long time to learn a lesson of their marriage.”
More importantly, Matt’s death teaches the family that heroes tend to be imaginary, that upon closer look, or put into the wrong situation, a hero can fail us miserably.
“I guess as you become an adult you see that even people you admire, like [ex-Secretary of State] Colin Powell, are put in situations where they are used and it’s very tricky. I think one of the messages, if there is one in the movie, is be careful having heroes,” said Weaver, who has certainly played her share of heroes, fictional and non-fictional on the screen. “I’m not sure that any of us should believe in heroes, but then, for instance, I saw ‘Hotel Rwanda,’ where Don Cheadle plays [Paul Rusesabagina], who saved 1500 lives. I’ve been in Rwanda and he really is a hero. It’s during times like this in our world that heroes appear because I think we do need them, but they are very far and few between.”
|
|
