I think if you're five-ten when you're eleven years old, you're just gonna be weird for the rest of your life," says Sigourney Weaver over tea one July afternoon. Weird is no doubt how she felt as child; individualistic is how she appears as an adult. Her lithe frame is showcased in a vaguely Asian outfit -- a spandex, gold-printed blue tank top and a long print skirt. Bright red toenails peek out of slingback shoes. When a mosquito dive-bombs her tea, she elegantly and matter-of-factly picks it out of her cup before taking a sip.

There are undeniable contradictions in Weaver's personality. In conversation, the 48-year-old, who lives in New York City with her husband, theater director Jim Simpson, and daughter, Charlotte, alternates between earnestness and self-mocking dryness, sometimes managing both at once. At least one of her directors has noticed this as well. "I'll never forget the look on her face," says James Cameron, recalling their visit to a firing range to pop off a semiautomatic machine gun in preparation for Aliens' superattenuated, monster-crushing Ripley. "There was shell raining down, and this acrid cloud of machine-gun smoke. She kind of grinned wolfishly and said, 'This is fun.' But you could tell she was also guilty about it, because she's this really liberal, cause-oriented person, down on handguns and all those sorts of things."

The daughter of former NBC head Pat Weaver, who created the Today show, and English actress Elizabeth Inglis, Weaver attended the Yale School of Drama and hoped to someday trade witticisms in the films of such greats as Woody Allen and Mike Nichols. While there, she garnered notice among her classmates as a kooky comedienne. In her first notable performance at Yale, she sang "a song called 'Better Dead Than Sorry' while receiving shock treatment," recalls playwright and friend Christopher Durang. "She made her own shock-treatment headdress. It had two spools like the horns of a cow, and out of each spool came little wires."

Her professors, however, were not supportive. "They really did tell me I had no talent and I'd never get anywhere. I should get all my money back from that place," says Weaver, laughing. She did eventually work for her heroes -- for Allen in Annie Hall, and for Nichols as the memorable patrician bitch in Working Girl. The well-brought-up woman from Manhattan's Upper East Side disappeared into the randy confusion of a cellist inhabited by the demon Zool, in Ghostbusters; into the dedication and anger of animal behaviorist Dian Fossey, in Gorillas in the Mist; and into the tortured mind of a vengeful victim, in Death and the Maiden. Along the way, she garnered three Oscar nominations for her work in three different genres -- action (Aliens), comedy (Working Girl), and drama (Gorillas in the Mist).

This year Weaver shows her range again with her searing portrayal of a sexually adventurous Connecticut housewife, in The Ice Storm, and her return as Ripley, in Alien Resurrection. Though the Alien franchise has proven Weaver to be the only bankable female action star, Ripley hadn't even been the hero in the original's first script. But producer-writer Walter Hill and producer David Giler thought they'd pull a switcheroo on audience expectations by having the handsome adventurer killed off, leaving Ripley to do battle in her underwear. Ridley Scott's resulting film has become a sci-fi classic. It was left to Cameron's sequel, however, to delineate the soul of a superwoman, a being whose real power comes from her intelligence, the constantly shifting gears that whirl behind her fear-frozen eyes as she tries to outmaneuver a being she can never simply overpower. "The thing we always differed on was how much she hated the alien," says Cameron. "Sigourney had the response, 'The alien is a creature and I can't blame it for the death of my crew,' and my feeling was, 'You hate that motherfucker.' I was the throttle and she was the brakes. She would always pull back from a moment that was pushing it too far -- that's why you get this incredibly modulated performance. Let's face it, science-fiction films don't usually get nominations for Best Actress."

Ridley [Scott] and I were in similar positions -- he'd made one movie, The Duellists. And he cast me, this nothing, and he would do things like he'd suddenly grab me and say, "Look, I'm not giving you a fucking motivation to pick up your teacup!" And I'd go off and cry. And then he'd come over and say, "I'm so sorry, I wanted to say that to John Hurt but I didn't feel I could, so I thought if I said it to you he would hear me." There was something about Ridley's honesty and lack of bullshit that gave [Alien] so much authenticity.

[In that one] I felt that Ripley came from a family of people in the service. She was very by-the-book, and when all this chaos started there was nowhere for her to go but inside, into her instincts. And so her arc was really from this rigid young ensign to this survivor.

In [Aliens], Jim [Cameron] just wrote me this great part. I was so incredibly moved that he would take the character of Ripley and so enrich her, and give her such strong things to do. The whole idea of Ripley as a rebel -- the company disenfranchises her when she comes back. She's persona non grata, she's in rebellion against this system because she knows what they really are. He gave Ripley so much heart and so much integrity in a different way.

Of course, she had that minor love story, and in Alien3 the first thing David Fincher does is kill that whole story. He kills the little girl, takes the love interest, Michael Biehn, puts them both in the morgue. Ripley loses everything she had ever looked forward to having a normal life with. And then of course she discovers that she has [an alien] inside her. That to me is the most existential.

What were your concerns about doing a fourth Alien?

I heard they were doing Alien versus Predator. I wanted nothing to do with that. I was so proud of the three we'd done. The last thing I wanted to do was stick around on a series that was just going to be done to make more money.

They called you with a straight face and told you this idea? Or did they take you out to lunch?

No, they didn't dare take me to lunch. First of all, I was . . . the whole experience of Alien3 was so difficult. [The studio] hired David Fincher, they thought he was great, and as soon as he started working on the picture, they panicked. And I thought that was unforgivable, you know, to hire this brilliant young director and not give him any support.

But you agreed to a fourth.

Tom Rothman and Peter Chernin [at Fox] hired Joss Whedon [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] to do a script that I thought was remarkable. That's what seduced me. For one thing, I wasn't playing the same thing. And it was very intriguing to me to be brought back. Suddenly we're talking about a time where they could bring you back against your will.

In Alien3, Ripley kills herself, and in this one she's cloned back from the dead. But she's not quite the same, is she?

[In Alien Resurrection] Ripley is part alien. She's not of either world. I feel she misses the alien world more, she's sort of stuck with the [humans], who seem ridiculous to her because they're always squabbling. She's from this landscape of death; if you have actually died, you have a very different outlook on survival. She's not intent on saving people. She's more of a nihilist. On the other hand, the animal in her would do anything to survive. It's almost as if the alien blood has made her so much more alive and more in her body. She's so strong, she's very sensual, she's very predatory, she has much more of a sense of humor, I think, because she has died.

It sounds like a great part.

Great part. I'm glad I died. My husband had said, "You're so stupid, you died. This is the biggest franchise in the world and you died."

Weren't you the one who wanted Ripley to die?

At that point I really wanted to do all these other things. It was perfect -- I got to go off and do other kinds of work and then come back to almost a new character.

Was your mother -- who had been an actress -- ambivalent about your becoming an actress?

I think both [my parents] thought I was too nice, and I would just get squashed. They knew the business is like a racket and full of rats. So they were very protective of me.

Weren't you told at Yale that you were slovenly?

They said that they hated my clothes. In California, where I went to college, I really lived like a hippie. What they saw in me was a leading lady, and I just couldn't go that way. I was constantly in these outrageous [comedies] by Chris Durang, Albert Innaurato. . . . That's not the way they saw me at all. I think Yale was good for me in the sense that I developed spite. You know, to be told by people who really had no business telling you so, "You can't do what you want to do," it's very galvanizing. Fury kept me going for quite a while.

They told you that because of how you looked?

I think because of the way I looked, because of my height. I was cast as prostitutes and old women. When I went to New York, I started having much more fun. No one was telling me I couldn't act. I started getting acknowledgement for my work. I still couldn't get an agent, but at least within the community of my peers, things were going well.

You've said that The Year of Living Dangerously is the movie you learned the most on.

Things happened on that film that gave me a lot of confidence. For instance, there's that scene where I walk through the rain: We shot one take and the fireman promptly knocked me over with this water. I was working off a piece I'd read in The New Yorker about the Holocaust to prepare, and I remember Peter [Weir] saying, "Cut, it's a disaster, I'm gonna rethink this scene, we're gonna shoot it on a sunny day." And then he said, "And whatever you were working on was completely wrong."

Why the Holocaust?

Because it's when she realizes there's going to be this massive civil war, and there was something in the article that just seemed to resonate with what was going to happen. Anyway, six weeks passed, we're in Australia watching rushes and all of a sudden this scene comes on. We'd already shot the scene sunny, but this scene with the water came on, and the whole thing, the walk, the rain, whatever I was doing, it was so powerful. And the lights came up and Peter stood up and said, "That's the movie."

Much of that movie was shot in the Philippines during a time of political unrest. You even got caught in a Muslim uprising. Were you scared?

It was probably one of the weirdest nights I've spent. We'd been getting these death threats because Ferdinand Marcos had just been in Saudi Arabia, so the Philippine Muslims were sort of testing their power -- I had a bodyguard who had a loaded pistol. I was having lunch with [costar] Michael Murphy at the hotel -- which to get into, you had to pass a guy with a machine gun who frisked you -- and this person I'd never seen before came up to us and said, "There's a car waiting outside, we have your passports, don't go upstairs, don't pack, we'll send everything to you, just get in the car and go to the airport." We missed our flight, so we had to spend this very strange night hiding out in an airport motel with Marcos's guards guarding us. It was very depressing because it looked like, after we'd done five weeks, we could easily have been shut down because of the expense of having to re-create everything over in Australia. Everyone was kind of crazy. We took over the lounge, we all performed. I did some weird Brecht song, and Mel [Gibson] stuck a lot of women's napkins down his pants and did this really lewd performance of "On the Sunny Side of the Street." We were up all night doing these very weird things because we thought, This is it. And then the next morning we flew to Australia and we were able to continue.

You're famous for going after parts you want.

I don't really do that anymore. I used to, but I never got any part I went after. It always blew up in my face.

Which ones did you chase?

There was a Fred Zinnemann movie, the one he did with Sean Connery, about climbing the mountain, very obscure [Five Days One Summer]. I wanted to work with Zinnemann so much, I flew myself over [to England], and he was such a gentleman, really from the old school. And he took my hand and said, "Sigourney, the studio doesn't care about what you're doing. You should never pay your own way over to meet a director," and I said, "I had to, it was the only way I could meet you." In the end, obviously, he chose another actress, who I think was a friend of the writer's.

Would you like to do another Woody Allen movie?

He's very shy, and I keep raising my hand, hoping he'll pick me. I don't know what to do short of throwing myself at his feet. That's still my dream, to work with Woody Allen. I only worked with him [on Annie Hall] that one day.

I've worked with Mike Nichols twice, and he's the best; he's enchantingly funny, very paternal, he always says the right thing. When we were opening Hurlyburly on Broadway, he gathered us together, we were all terribly nervous, it was a difficult play, and he smiled -- he beamed at us -- and said, "Remember, everything depends on tonight," and we howled with laughter. It was just a horrible thing to say, and it relaxed us all. There were certain things he would illuminate, asking us to do a gesture or a line in a certain way.

Is the gorilla you carry off the plane in Working Girl an in-joke?

Mike wanted me to be dressed in white and carry the gorilla against the Manhattan skyline -- it was a joke about King Kong and Fay Wray. And I said, "Gosh, Mike, I just did this movie all about gorillas and it may be like this double joke -- I think they might think of Dian Fossey before they think of Fay Wray." And he didn't care.

Was Gorillas in the Mist a grueling shoot?

I thought, How lucky it is to be an actor -- join SAG and see the world. Suddenly I was being flown to Kenya and Rwanda -- Rwanda is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, with the most wonderful people. It's so amazing to me I was able to see it before all [the recent] tragedy. I told my husband that I wanted to buy a house in Rwanda. And he said, "You know, we have this tiny apartment in New York. I think if we buy a house, it should be somewhere we can go for the weekend."

They needed an actress who would enjoy working with a gorilla and not run screaming down the hill, so they sent me over a month and a half early to see if I'd run down the hill. And I got there and I climbed up into this incredibly beautiful jungle -- the going is very difficult because it's not like hiking, you're actually stepping on top of deep layers of jungle and roots and things, and it's very wet. I was there with Dian Fossey's group. And this little gorilla came over and sat down next to me and put her hand on my arm, and her hand was so hot, I felt it all the way through my windbreaker, and from that moment on, every time I was with the gorillas, I felt such intense joy, like nothing I've ever felt, except maybe being with my daughter. No matter how hard it was or how wet we were and how miserable, as soon as we got with the gorillas, it all fell away. And I was transported with joy, there is no other word for it. I felt it was sort of Dian's spirit looking out for me.

I felt a big responsibility playing Dian, and I'm not sure I was successful. I'd never played a real person before. I think our mistake was that our script covered eighteen years. You could not take eighteen years and show her complexity. Because [director] Michael Apted and I wanted to have this sort of gritty documentary and it turned into this sort of very beautiful Hollywood film.

Do you ever regret turning down The Piano?

I wasn't asked.

Jane Campion always says in interviews that she wanted you.

I know. I got mad at my agent, Steve Dontanville, for this. I think I told Steve that I didn't want to work during that period. So he convinced her to take Holly Hunter. When the movie came out, she said in The New York Times that she was looking for a Sigourney Weaver type, so I called Steve and said, "Hey, Holly Hunter is a Sigourney Weaver type? What happened to me? I'm the original Sigourney Weaver type!" I still give him such a hard time. I would have loved to do that.

It seems like Hollywood has almost never cast you as a sexy woman.

I'm still hoping that as I mature in this business, I'll be able to play the Simone Signoret parts. I mean, I know it's preposterous, but I'm hoping that I'll actually be given a chance to do some love stories, because I find those really wonderful to do.

Now studios would probably consider you too old to play opposite Mel Gibson.

I think that would be up to Mel, but certainly it's customary to have men 20 years older than their female costars. I was talking to a [director] friend about this and he was getting kind of upset. But my point was that when a guy is 20 or 30 years older than the woman, it's just taken for granted that that's a proper pairing, but if I play an older woman, and I'm with a guy 15 or 20 years younger, that's got to be the focus of the story, which automatically says that this is a freakish event. And I think [older woman-younger man pairings] happen all the time. But with all the young filmmakers we have coming on, I don't think a lot of these cliches will work the same way.

Aren't you older than your husband?

I'm quite a few years older than him. He couldn't have cared less how old I was. I was a little freaked. I think that age is just a number, [but] it matters when the studio is putting together a package. And it's true that in a lot of ways, the camera favors youth and old age, because a lot of cinematographers don't light faces -- it's kind of a lost art, it's not cool. They light rooms, they light everyone kind of dirty, gritty. So it becomes an issue. You have to think about whether you want to get in there and say, "This is the way to light me."

It helps to have those patrician bones.

I like my face better now than when I was young. When I was young I was pretty, but I had a sort of blank face -- just these big eyes and little nose. Now my face looks more alive to me. More interesting. My rule of thumb is, unless there's a point to it, why make me look uglier than I actually look? I've never worked with a cinematographer who didn't want to light me well.

When things don't go right on a movie, do you get depressed?

I try to fix it, actually. I feel that it's truly a collaboration, and there are weeks when directors are completely exhausted, and sometimes it's good to just talk about the movie you're making, kind of remind each other what you're doing. I've never had a situation in which there was something wrong with the director that I had to work out. Occasionally in the beginning with Roman [Polanski, on Death and the Maiden], I found his style hard to take. He comes from that school of directors that thinks the less secure the actor feels, the better. It's not my school, and it was pretty tough, but he's such a brilliant director that I didn't care.

How did you get involved with Death and the Maiden?

I turned it down at first because I wanted to be with my family and I had never seen the play. I had worked with human-rights groups -- Human Rights Watch and Witness -- for quite a while. I'd met all these people coming through New York who were human-rights activists and who had experienced a lot that [the character] Paulina had, and I always thought, goddammit, I'm an actor, I'm not a lawyer. [But] when this came along, I thought I would get to tell a story about this, and Roman, surprisingly to me, really wanted me for the part. I think because of the Alien pictures. I had not ventured into the sort of Meryl Streep area of serious drama and my husband said, "You have to do this. Don't stay home." It was a real turning point for me because this part you couldn't think about at all, it had to be from the gut, and it gave me a whole new way of working. Suddenly, in my early 40s, I fell in love with acting all over again.

Why is your character, Janey, so unhappy in The Ice Storm?

I said to Ang [Lee, the director], "You know, I didn't realize I was playing her so unhappy." He said, "You didn't play her unhappy, she is unhappy." She's upset because she blew it. She's very frustrated because the thing she'd really wanted to do with her life, she realized later she could have done. But when she was younger it just wasn't open for women in the same way. She was caught like a lot of people in a strange sort of time vacuum, where they wanted to experience their youth again, and the only way they could do it was through these sort of illicit affairs and key parties.

So many of the women of that generation got divorced.

They suddenly realized so many things. My mother was beyond where she might have changed her life, but I think it percolated in her, a lot of feelings about having given up her career to raise a family. I think that the sexual revolution and the women's movement put a lot of women into anguish, because they realized that there were alternatives that they had never seriously considered for themselves. I don't really think that Janey's a bad, miserable person. I think she's just more impatient with her choices.

It sounds like your own opportunities keep expanding.

I feel comfortable with Fox [Weaver's company, Goat Cay Productions, is funded by Fox]. I don't feel like an actor looking for a job; with these people I feel part of the creative community. It's a huge change. It was an important transition for me to make because at some point I hope to do more of my own work, maybe even direct. It would be really fun to write and direct a film -- it would be very low budget -- so I could have freedom. I guess because I'm a New Yorker, I always defined myself by theater. Not that I looked down on film, but I didn't recognize myself in that world. Now I'm able to.

Rachel Abramowitz is a writer at large for Premiere.