Susan Alexandra Weaver was born in New York City in 1949, the daughter of English actress Elizabeth Inglis and television executive and NBC president Pat Weaver (who famously created The Today Show in the 1950s). She changed her name to the much more distinct “Sigourney” as a teenager (after a character from The Great Gatsby) before showing an interest in stage performing while attending Ethel Walker School in Connecticut. Before she even turned 18 she landed roles in some heavy hitters, including A Streetcar Named Desire and You Can’t Take it With You.

She continued being involved in theater while attending Stanford University in California, avoiding the school’s drama department because she found it too self-serious and artistically safe, electing instead to participate with a more adventurous group of actors in nearby Palo Alto called The Company. Upon her graduation from Stanford in 1972 she was accepted into the Yale School of Drama (alongside fellow student Meryl Streep). Once again, she found the experience challenging due to stuffy acting teachers refusing to cast her in plays and calling her talentless. But once again, she found her own group at the Yale Cabaret, whose members regularly cast her in plays until she graduated with an MFA in 1974, making her Broadway debut a year later acting alongside Ingrid Bergman in The Constant Wife. She never stopped acting in plays and she even earned a Best Actress Tony nomination in 1985 for her role as Darlene in Mike Nichols’ production of the David Rabe dark comedy Hurlyburly.

Weaver was also slowly building a screen acting career, having a brief role in Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning comedy Annie Hall (1977) which would have been a big deal alone but it was followed only two years later by what became her breakout role as Lieutenant Ellen Ripley in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror film Alien (1979). Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren were considered for the role before her, but Weaver blew Ridley Scott away in her audition. It’s probably still Sigourney Weaver’s most famous role to this day in addition to Alien being the film that first put her on the map as a star in the making. She would reprise the role of Ripley in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens (earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in the process) as well as Alien 3 (1992) and Alien Resurrection (1997) and she also revealed that she would be open to playing her again in future movies.

After Alien, she played TV reporter Toni Sokolow in the Peter Yates thriller Eyewitness (1981), she played British embassy officer Jill Bryant in Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave drama The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and she starred as Dana Barrett, a woman whose New York apartment building becomes haunted in Ivan Reitman’s supernatural comedy Ghostbusters (1984), playing it nicely straight opposite Bill Murray and the rest of the kooky cast (at least until the moment in the film when she gets possessed). She would reprise that role in Ghostbusters II (1989).

After receiving her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Aliens, she was nominated in the category again for her role as conservationist and primate researcher Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), and that same year she also received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as administrative assistant Katharine in Working Girl (1988), a rom-com about a secretary (Melanie Griffith) whose intelligence and business instincts get taken advantage of when her boss (Harrison Ford) steals credit for her ideas.

In the 1990s she reunited with Ivan Reitman for his political comedy Dave (1993) playing the first lady opposite Kevin Kline, and she had a critical and commercial hit when she starred in the psychological thriller Copycat (1995) opposite Holly Hunter. She also starred in the less commercially successful but nonetheless critically adored auteur-driven films Death and the Maiden (1994) directed by Roman Polanski and The Ice Storm (1997) directed by Ang Lee in addition to the cult hit sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest (1999). Some of the most commercially successful films she appeared in the following decade include Disney’s Holes (2003), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), the political thriller Vantage Point (2008) and the rom-com Baby Mama (2008). She also lent her voice to the animated films WALL-E and The Tale of Despereaux, both released in 2008.

In 2009 she reunited with James Cameron for his sci-fi epic Avatar, starring as Dr. Grace Augustine the exobiologist who heads the Avatar Program. She would reprise that role in Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and also portray a new character named Kiri (the teenage Na’vi offspring of Dr. Augustine’s Na’vi avatar). Weaver would reprise the role of Kiri in Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025).

Thanks to the cultural impact of things like Alien and Avatar, she is popularly associated with sci-fi, but Weaver has managed to avoid being pigeonholed into any one type of role and she has done a wide variety of things on screen. After Avatar she acted in comedies like You Again (2010), Cedar Rapids (2011) and Paul (2011), small independent films like The Good House (2021), Call Jane (2022) and Master Gardener (2022), horror films like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and Dust Bunny (2025), the dark fantasy A Monster Calls (2016) and even films featuring small cameo appearances like Pixar’s Finding Dory (2016), Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters (2016) and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). Plus there’s more sci-fi on the way with Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu currently scheduled to be released in 2026.

Sigourney Weaver has also found success on the small screen, with guest roles in shows like Futurama, Eli Stone, Doc Martin, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Call My Agent! as well as regular roles in Greg Berlanti’s USA Network miniseries Political Animals (2012) as fictional U.S. Secretary of State Elaine Barrish, and Marvel’s Netflix miniseries The Defenders (2017) as Alexandra Reid the leader of the supervillain organization known as the Hand. But her most lauded role came when she starred in and executive produced the Australian dramatic miniseries The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (2023) on Amazon Prime Video. That miniseries ended up winning the AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) Award for Best Miniseries or Telefeature while Weaver got a nomination for Best Lead Actress. A title she deserves for practically all of her film and TV roles because she has truly cemented her status as one of the best actors out there.