Sunday, July 15, 2012

Actress Sigourney Weaver

Sigourney Weaver's first movie role was an inauspicious one.  She appeared near the end of 1977's Annie Hall, standing next to Woody Allen in front of a theater as his character's date. She had no lines, and the scene was shot from a distance.  It was even less than Jeff Goldblum's walk-on part in the same movie.

Two years later, she became a star as Ellen Ripley in Alien, a role she would play three more times. In between, she played Dana Barrett in two Ghostbusters movies.


Of course, Sigourney Weaver is more than just a talented actress who's appeared in a few blockbuster movies.  She made a name for herself in more serious fare, such as a televison reporter on the trail of a murderer in Eyewitness and as British Embassy officer Jilly Bryant in The Year Of Living Dangerously, about the 1965 fall of Indonesian President Sukarno.  She played both the dramatic and comedic ends of her talents in two 1988 movies, as doomed conservationist Dian Fossey in the biodrama Gorillas In the Mist, and as the duplicitous boss Katharine Parker in the Melanie Griffith vehicle Working Girl


Tonight (July 15, 2012), Sigourney Weaver debuts in the USA cable TV miniseries "Political Animals," playing Elaine Barrish, a  current secretary of State and former First Lady who of course is loosely based on Hillary Clinton.

But, this isn't the first time Sigourney Weaver has played a First Lady.  Anyone remember the hilarious 1993 political satire movie Dave? :-D

Fun fact #1: Sigourney Weaver's original first name is Susan.  She took "Sigourney" from an obscure character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's book "The Great Gatsby."     

Fun fact #2: She holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford and an Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale.

Fun fact #3: She was once engaged to reporter Aaron Latham, who later married Lesley Stahl.    

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