"I don't know what it is with me and cosmic fashion," mulls Sigourney Weaver. She's back in a spacesuit for Galaxy Quest, a space spoof about a group of has-been actors whose TV show, a knock-off of Star Trek, is cancelled and they are forced to make money by attending fan-convention autograph sessions and store openings.
"I am a busty blonde thermian, very much a babe, very human, easily frightened. Nobody will have Ripley feelings about this character."
Weaver gives a hearty giggle at the notion. "My fellow travellers are Alan Rickman, who's half alien, half human, Tim Allen, Tony Shalhoub and Sam Rockwell. We comprise a bickering, snarling family who need our fans.
"When a little group of fans asks us to come and visit their spaceship, a replica of our one, we go and they actually take us into space. They believe our show was for real and Tim Allen, our commmander, is too vain to tell them we are just actors. Which I suppose is what it's all about."

Sigourney Weaver is, both on and off the screen, a consummate actor. (Actresses, she says, wear feather boas.)
Her super-gymed body is lean and she has memorable lips. With her dark candid eyes and sharp cheekbones, she gives little away. In high-heels, her 180cm frame is pushed way above everybody else. She is sparky but not prickly. Only her nervous hands working over time offer an inkling to the person beneath her cool, elegant exterior.
Weaver comes from an inescapably Waspy background. Her father (Sylvester "Pat" Weaver) was once president of the American network NBC.
Her English mother (Elizabeth Inglis) Was an actress who appeared in films such as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.
"My parents were so wildly cosmopolitan that I craved normality. I grew up with an expectation that I wouldn't achieve anything. I was a real late developer and also quite backward and very shy. Still, nowadays, when I get caught in a crisis situation, like being trapped in an elevator, I pretend I'm Ripley," she admits in that rich, sexy voice, a legacy from being a smoker for years, almost as if to excuse herself.
"Believe me, I'm not at all that brave in real life. I'm no Ripley. I'm not even Sigourney, if push comes to shove!"
(Christened Susan, she changed her name to Sigourney after a minor [male] character in The Great Gatsby in a teen identity crisis over her siblings being named Trajan and Flavia respectively.)

Weaver was educated at two universities, and has a BA in English from Stanford and an MA in Drama from Yale.
At 29 and not a hugely known theatre actress, she went to audition for the first Alien and became a huge star.
"I felt that to do science-fiction was below even me so I just went along for a sort of a laugh. And look what happened - I'm still doing science fiction," says the ultimate astrobabe.
"I originally took Galaxy Quest to keep my agent happy but we had such a good time making it. Some of my lines are incredibly stupid, we are talking fleeting dramatic moments here, but I try to say them as if they're not. "Galaxy Quest is a million miles from Alien. It is all frenzy and action, more like Spaceballs. I see the Alien pictures as non-action. They are close-up, terribly claustrophobic films in which not a lot happens except for the occasional rush.
"I love the bare-bones survivalist nature of Ripley. I am always wary of the typcast situation. My Galaxy Quest character is bare bosom rather than bare bones. Wardrobe has put me in a bra that gives me a cleavage bigger than Pamela Anderson's. This is a big film!" Weaver extends her hand out to "here".
Her filmography is littered with big films like The Year Of Living Dangerously, Ghostbusters, Working Girl, Gorillas In The Mist, The Ice Storm, Death And The Maiden. (There are a few really awful ones like Half Moon Street, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise, and French film One Woman Or Two with Gerard Depardieu.)

She is married to the New York theatre director Jim Simpson. When they wed in 1984 they had bagpipes and bongos at the service and gave their guests washable tattoos.
They have a daughter, Charlotte, born when Weaver was 40, and live in New York City and upstate.
Now she also has her own production company Goat Cay and works to bring new theatrical talent to the film industry. Hardly a small indy-prod concern, it co-ordinates mainly with Twentieth Century Fox. "I feel more at home in small-scale independant films. I had a lot of satisfaction from my next film, The Map At The End Of The World, in which I play a wife and mother in a rural community numbed by guilt after a friend's son drowns. Because I am a mother I found I had a lot of resistance before I could break through to that particular emotional arena," she says.
"I hanker after the occasional romantic lead but because of my height, many studio executives complain they could never see me as a romantic creature, but I'd like to play more ordinary roles - normal women, mothers, women like that. I seldom get asked to do those roles.
"For some reason I only get offered parts about women who are very isolated, on the outside, who don't have families, don't fall in love."

Galaxy Quest opens today

- Article written by Marianne Gray, from the April 6, 2000 edition of The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)

Transcribed by Rick Haslewood, 9/04/00