20. Deal of the Century (1983) William Friedkin directed this broad, knockabout comedy about arms dealing without much flair and it is really only a vehicle for that lost legend of 80s screen comedy, Chevy Chase. He is a small-time arms dealer and Sigourney Weaver plays the haughty and enraged widow of a corporate defence contractor, Wallace Shawn, blaming Chase for her husband’s untimely death in the fictional South American state of San Miguel, where both men had been touting for business. United by greed, and maybe a spark of something more, Weaver joins Chase on a mission to close the arms deal of the century. This doesn’t do justice to Weaver’s class and style. 19. The Girl in the Park (2007) Weaver is at her most self-conscious and theatrical in this contrived and derivative oddity written and directed by Pulitzer-winning dramatist David Auburn. She plays Julia, a New York jazz singer who one terrifying day loses her three-year-old daughter in Central Park. Sixteen years later, and with her daughter’s disappearance still an unsolved mystery, Julia is now emotionally frozen – but then takes it into her head to befriend a strange young woman, Louise (Kate Bosworth), believing her to be her lost daughter. This is a role that shows how casting directors believe Weaver is most convincing when she is spiky and almost unfeminine, and this film calls for hammy and caricatured emotional scenes. 18. 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) Weaver’s statuesque poise, aristocratic beauty, dry intelligence and style make her an obvious choice for a royal role. (How about Shakespeare, by the way? Weaver played Portia in an off-Broadway Merchant of Venice in the 80s, but sadly nothing on screen.) 1492: Conquest of Paradise was released for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s American landfall. Gérard Depardieu is Columbus and Weaver is Queen Isabella, who commissions his great adventure on the understanding that its much-anticipated profits will be handed over to her. With not much screen time, Weaver had to be haughty and queenly yet vulnerable and suggest a platonic spark with Columbus. She was certainly more potent in the role than Rachel Ward, who played Isabella in a rival Columbus film that same anniversary year, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. 17. Snow Cake (2006) Since 2006, the conversation around how to represent neurodiverse people on screen has moved on. Even at the time, though, there was a cool critical reception for Weaver’s mannered performance, playing an autistic woman whose daughter is killed while hitchhiking and who forms a relationship with the man who was driving the car, though not at fault for the crash – played by Alan Rickman. Weaver’s performance was thought to be toe-curlingly well-intentioned, but she is subtler than Dustin Hoffman’s broad turn in Rain Main and it is at least a stretch for her. 16. The Village (2004) M Night Shyamalan’s period-costume mystery chiller exasperated all who sat through it, with its weird plot-holes and silly twist. But it was at least performed with conviction, not least by Weaver, playing Alice Hunt, one of the elders in a remote village surrounded by dense forests in which supernatural beasts are rumoured to live. She is one of the community leaders who have evidently brokered a peace deal with these strange creatures, and is faintly aware that another elder, played by William Hurt, may be in love with her. Weaver carries off the role with dignity, and it would be interesting to see her as Elizabeth Proctor in Miller’s The Crucible. 15. Copycat (1995) This is certainly a meaty role for Weaver, playing Dr Helen Hudson – a forensic psychologist and media celebrity confronted with a “copycat” serial killer who is murdering people in the style of other killers, clearly learned from Hudson’s own lectures. Ironically, of course, the film is itself a “copycat” knockoff of The Silence of the Lambs; cops are asking for help from an imprisoned killer and the film imprisons the agoraphobic Hudson in her apartment in somewhat Lecterish seclusion. Not a great film, maybe, but it’s a very tense opening attack scene – and Weaver brings to it her natural authority. 14. Dave (1993) Nothing enrages the Sigourney Weaver superfan community more than the suggestion that she is best cast as a “bitch”: that crude and vulgar term does no justice to her talent for alpha-female black comedy. Here she plays an icy, cynical and disaffected first lady, Ellen Mitchell, married to a charmless US president who, after falling into a coma, has to be secretly replaced by a goofy and hapless double, Dave, played by Kevin Kline. Cheerful Dave turns out to be a better and more compassionate president than the real thing, and little by little, Ellen finds herself falling back in love with her miraculously transformed husband, as well as converted to more caring causes. Weaver has to be second banana to Kline, but it’s a tasty performance. 13. Holes (2003) Perhaps best known for giving Shia LaBeouf his movie breakthrough, this Disney feature is about convicted teen criminals being sent to a fearsome prison camp where they have to dig holes all day in the burning sun. Weaver is on very good form as the imperious warden Louise Walker, who terrifies not merely the prisoners but the guards as well. But her hole-digging policy is not just pointless labour: Walker is looking for something out there, as the land has some treasure connected with her strange family history. It’s a juicy, villainous role for Weaver. 13. The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) Weaver has become known as the great action star, but here she had to content herself with a more conventionally demure, feminine (if gutsy) role in Peter Weir’s fierce romantic drama. Mel Gibson stars as an Australian foreign correspondent in 1965 covering the tumult in President Sukarno’s Indonesia, and Weaver is Jill, a British embassy official who of course falls for the passionate and even recklessly courageous Gibson. Perhaps Gibson and Weaver were both upstaged by Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar for her cross-dressing performance as the local fixer, Billy Kwan. Weaver brought a real touch of Waspy class to this story – in which she revealed herself to be something of a Le Carré heroine. 11. Avatar (2009) It’s amazing to think how hugely important this sci-fi spectacular from James Cameron was once considered to be, not least for its next-level 3D, which we might want to revive now to get people back into cinemas. In the future, Earth needs a new energy source from a distant planet that is the home of strange blue Smurf-like creatures called Na’vi. A brilliant scientist, played by Weaver, has developed virtual reality technology that will enable Earth’s scientists and mining engineers to pilot “Avatar” creatures directly into the forest to seduce the natives. It’s a nice “chief scientist” role for Weaver, playing on her intelligence and authority, although the character is so earnest she’s a bit bland. 10. WALL-E (2008) Andrew Stanton’s Pixar gem has a tiny, vulnerable little robot left all alone on Earth, Robinson-Crusoe-like, one of the automatons with the task to clean up the place despoiled by uncaring humans. But then WALL-E is whisked away across the galaxy in a spaceship that has a computer voiced by Weaver, whose droll, wry, eyebrow-raised voice is perfect for this kind of role. (The casting was said to be a subtle nod to the ship’s computer in Alien, called Mother.) Weaver’s voiceover work has flourished in the latter part of her career, including playing herself as the public-address system in Pixar’s Finding Dory in 2006. 9. Ghostbusters (1984) Just after her deadly serious turns in Alien and The Year of Living Dangerously, Weaver revealed her comedy chops in the legendary Ghostbusters. She plays Dana Barrett, a cellist (the classy line of work was reportedly Weaver’s idea) who is surprised in her New York apartment by a ghost that jumps out of the fridge, announcing itself by the name of Zuul. When Bill Murray’s roguish Dr Venkman shows up, Dana is transformed/possessed by Zuul and her scene becomes a vampy-sexy parody of The Exorcist in which Weaver hovers above the bed. Not a big part, but Weaver instinctively knew how to make her elegance work comically. 8. Baby Mama (2008) This is really nothing more than a comic cameo for Weaver, but superbly performed and a part to which she insouciantly brought her now iconic status in cinema. Tina Fey is a prosperous career woman longing for a baby; Amy Poehler plays the trailer-park diva who is permitted to move into her flash apartment as the reproductively unchallenged surrogate mother. But the smarmy head of the surrogacy agency running all this is the impossibly smooth Weaver, who, in her 50s, appears to get pregnant naturally all the time, and tactlessly glories in her designer-clad earth-mother status in front of the childless clientele. 7. A Map of the World (1999) One of the few films in Weaver’s career that gives her a serious and substantial role that matches her formidable abilities. She is Alice, a school nurse who with her husband, Howard (David Strathairn), is rather hippyishly running a farm. The couple is not, however, entirely accepted in the locality and when the small child of their neighbour Theresa (Julianne Moore) drowns in their pond, the entire community turns against Alice, even suspecting of her child abuse. It’s a heavyweight film, maybe a bit heavy going – but it’s a powerful, vehement and deeply felt performance from Weaver. 6. Heartbreakers (2001) Weaver brought her A-game, and all of her naturally angular patrician style to this outstanding and very underrated grifter caper. She plays Angela, an amazingly glamorous woman who dazzles and seduces wealthy men into marriage, and then uses her sexy daughter Wendy, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, to entrap these rich horny dopes into compromising positions that end in costly divorce – whereupon the mother-daughter team duly split the victim’s wealth. The men who are in their sights include Ray Liotta and Gene Hackman. Great stuff from Weaver, in a role that only she could have played. 5. Galaxy Quest (1999) This glorious comedy was blessed with an A-list cast and perhaps none classier than Weaver herself, in a sci-fi spaceship drama hardly less potent than the Alien franchise. She plays Gwen DeMarco, one of the cast of a Star Trek-type TV show (along with Alan Rickman and Tim Allen) the cancellation of which left its typecast stars unable to find other roles, condemned to scrape a living on an endless round of fan conventions, selling signed photographs and memorabilia, humiliatingly forced to dress up in the costumes and declaim the catchphrases. Weaver absolutely commits to her meta role in the corny TV show, and her calmly professional character outside it. 4. Gorillas in the Mist (1988) Her toweringly imperious American-memsahib here is a Weaver classic, playing the real-life primatologist Dian Fossey, who battled poachers and corrupt politicians to save gorillas in Rwanda, until her (still unsolved) murder there in 1985. Nowadays there might be mutterings about “white saviour movies” and even at the time it wasn’t entirely clear if Weaver’s Fossey was supposed to be a glorious heroine or a Conradian figure who had somehow got lost in the heart of her own emotional darkness. Fossey has an affair with the hunky National Geographic photographer who is recording her exploits (Bryan Brown), but faced with the choice of marrying him or staying with her gorillas she chooses the latter. She winds up having an intense relationship with a gorilla named Digit, whose fate triggers her rage-filled desire for justice at all costs. Gorillas in the Mist is a movie driven by Weaver’s commanding personality. Only she could have made it work. 3. The Ice Storm (1997) Here was the film that, 25 years on from its original 70s setting, established louche suburban swinging as a commonplace activity of the era – and established the marital anxiety and commuter longing themes to be taken up later by Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. In Nixon’s America, a land of disillusionment where the older generation have appropriated the sexual revolution in a more bourgeois form, Weaver plays Janey, a married woman whose erotic life has become a petrified forest of discontent. She is having an affair with married neighbour Ben, played by Kevin Kline – a wan and furtive sexual excitement that is in fact symptomatic of emotional stagnancy. When they and some others show up for drinks at what turns out to be a racy “key party”, and Janey looks like leaving with a handsome younger man – it is Ben and not Janey’s actual husband who on drunken impulse rises to his feet in protest, thus revealing their secret. Weaver is the heart of the film: passionate, beautiful, frustrated, aware of an awful storm gathering. 2. The Alien Franchise (micro-ranking is 4: Alien 3 (1992), 3: Alien Resurrection (1997), 2: Alien (1979), 1: Aliens (1986) There can be no doubt as to what made Weaver a star and an icon in Hollywood cinema: it is her unique action-heroine performance as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley on board the spaceship Nostromo; her centuries-spanning destiny is to battle the hideously fanged and inexorably growing Alien that she first encountered when it infiltrated the ship. Weaver’s Ripley – originally conceived as a man – was switched to a woman by the director of the first film, Ridley Scott, and the authority of Weaver in the role, her natural air of command and refusal of the gender-stereotyped romantic submissiveness, has subtly coloured all her roles ever since. Weaver’s bold characterisation is what took Alien out of the sci-fi horror ghetto and helped established it as potent satirical and political commentary on the idea of empire, conquest and the Other. Ripley herself evolved from a horror-style Final Girl into the blazing warrior-queen with a maternal instinct in James Cameron’s sequel – the most impressive film of the franchise, which earned Weaver her first best actress nomination. Then she became the sacrificial queen of David Fincher’s third film and then the clone-refabricated icon of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fourth. Ripley was the role that spanned almost 20 years of Weaver’s career, and she brought to it powerhouse energy and intelligence. 1. Working Girl (1988) Her greatest role was the one where she herself got to play the terrifying predator-parasite: an alpha-female who is pure corporate villain and yet rooted in a recognisable world. The role of the machiavellian schemer Katharine Parker in Mike Nichols’ yuppie-workplace comedy Working Girl is Weaver’s masterpiece; in the annus mirabilis of 1988 it got her a best supporting actress Oscar nomination to go with her best actress nomination for Gorillas in the Mist. Weaver plays the blue-blooded Manhattan boss who graciously mentors Melanie Griffith’s ambitious Staten Island secretary Tess with the sole aim of toying with her, humiliating her and ripping off her excellent ideas. She also plans to marry the handsome Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), who in fact is more attracted to Tess. Weaver speaking German on the phone to a ski-lodge resort manager is a creepy joy: “Du bist mein Süsse!” And there is something worryingly real about the office-bully way she makes Tess repeat the motivational mantra: “Who makes it happen?” so that poor, mortified Tess is brought to the brink of tears. In Working Girl, Weaver combined her patrician style, lethal sexiness and big-city sophistication.