Sigourney Weaver: I finally love my body at 60
AVATAR actress Sigourney Weaver hit the big time 26 years ago as a 34-year-old starlet with impossibly long legs in Ghost Busters.
Now, at 60, she says she feels sexier than ever before without what she calls the “standard Hollywood age props” of Botox and plastic surgery.
“I like my body now,” she reveals, “where, in younger days, I could always find fault. I feel I have my curves at last.
They may come from age, but I don’t care. I’m just glad they are there.”
In a rare interview, the actress cautions other young wannabes: “I would never have plastic surgery or Botox injections. How can you as an actress? They both leave you with such a tight, unreal look.
“It’s something fans and audiences pick up on instantly. Actors’ faces should actually be able to move.”
She has been happily married for 25 years to her theatre director husband Jim Simpson, 53, with whom she has a daughter, Charlotte, 19.
One reason for the un-Hollywood like longevity of her marriage, she believes, is the fact that she, Jim and Charlotte don’t live in Los Angeles.
Despite her action hero role as Ripley in the 1979 classic Alien, she confesses:
“In real life I’m a scaredy-cat.
“The reason we’re nowhere near Hollywood is that I could never, ever live in Los Angeles for fear of earthquakes.
I’m also terrified of elevators. I’ve been trapped twice in one and every time I have to get in one now I’m scared to
death.”
Sigourney, nominated for two Oscars in the same year, best actress in Gorillas In The Mist and best supporting actress in Working Girl in 1988, even says she buries her head in her hands during the scary scenes in her own movies.
“I’m still missing about half of Alien because, to this day, I can’t bear to look at the more frightening moments. I couldn’t be further removed from the action hero off-screen. I’m more of a mouse.”
It was a reprise of her Ripley role in the 1986 sequel Aliens that led to her meeting Cameron, whose Avatar is expected to dominate the Golden Globes next Sunday, along with this year’s Oscars.
“This time the aliens weren’t so scary so I’ve watched this one all the way though,” says Sigourney.
Her next project is a biopic on Gypsy Rose Lee in the years after she’d finished taking off her clothes for a living.
Sigourney says: “It’s just as well. The last thing I’d ever do is appear nude on screen. That would be just too scary.”