Sigourney Weaver

Weaver grew up in New York, the daughter of an NBC television executive and a British actress, and studied English at Stanford before earning an MFA in drama from Yale, where classmates reportedly included several future major playwrights and directors. She spent years doing stage and off-Broadway work with little screen exposure before a small role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall led, indirectly, to her audition for Alien.

As Ellen Ripley she created the modern action heroine twice: the pragmatic survivor of 1979 and the flame-throwing mother of 1986, genre cinema's most important single piece of casting. She was a Yale School of Drama graduate with almost no film experience when she was cast, and the role was written without a specified gender, open to any actor who could carry the part.

Her performance in Aliens earned her an Academy Award nomination, a rarity for an action-horror sequel at the time and a recognition that helped legitimize genre filmmaking as a place for serious acting. She has returned to the role across four films spanning nearly two decades, and Ripley remains the character most closely identified with her entire career.