Sigourney Weaver doesn’t sit around and watch her greatest hits. But a few years ago, she did revisit perhaps the greatest of her greatest—the original Alien, the 1979 sci-fi horror classic that launched her movie career, and a movie franchise, 40 years ago this summer.

“It was a walk down memory lane,” she says. “The scene where I’m floating in a white spacesuit watching the alien get pulled away? I remember the effects guys hung me up, 30 feet off the ground, and left me there while they went to lunch!”

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And four decades later, she still hasn’t quite come down. The bone-chilling, nerve-rattling Alien—in which the members of a commercial space attempt to fight off a deadly extraterrestrial they’ve brought aboard—may be legendary for its masterful production design, the beast bursting out of a character’s torso and the immortal tag line, “In space, nobody can hear you scream.” But it was a groundbreaker because of Weaver’s standout performance as coolheaded warrant officer Ellen Ripley, the movie’s steely heroine who fought back and lived to tell the horrors, Moby Dick–style, aboard the spaceship Nostromo.

“The story was originally all men,” Weaver, 69, explains. “But the writers thought it would be very timely to have a woman be the sole survivor. Nobody saw her coming.”

That’s especially true because Ripley was played by a 28-year-old stage actress in her first major role. “I was Miss Nobody from nowhere!” says Weaver, who’s since racked up more than 80 diverse acting credits in everything from mainstream comedies (Ghostbusters, Working Girl, Dave, Heartbreakers) to acclaimed dramas (The Ice Storm, Gorillas in the Mist, The Year of Living Dangerously). She’s also a three-time Oscar nominee who received a Best Actress nod for reprising the role of Ripley in the 1986 sequel, Aliens. She’s since portrayed the character two more times on the big screen, advancing in rank to lieutenant and kicking major alien butt across the galaxy.

“I’m very proud of [Ripley] because she couldn’t be any less like me,” Weaver says. “When something bad happens, Ripley says, ‘OK, here’s what I need to do.’ She does her duty and never gives up. I’d be the person cracking jokes to deflect the terror.”

Related: We Ranked All Eight of the Alien Films, Including Alien: Covenant

TOWERING TALENT

“I never thought I’d be an actress,” Weaver says in between bites of chicken salad after the camera stops clicking at her Parade photo shoot. It wasn’t because her mother, British stage thespian Elizabeth Inglis, tried her hand in Hollywood and didn’t make it big. And not because her father, Pat, was a hard-to-compete-with television pioneer.

It was her height: At age 11, Weaver was already 5-foot-10½, self-consciously towering over her mom. “I felt like a giant spider,” she says. “I never had the confidence to ever think I could act.”

The Weavers didn’t go to many movies, save for comedies like The Pink Panther. In their Manhattan household, television was king. She’s still in awe of her father’s TV accomplishments. “He was amazing. While his friends were creating Hee Haw, he was breaking ground,” book-ending broadcast television by creating the Today and Tonight shows in the 1950s.

Weaver’s mom, meanwhile, made sure her daughter knew how to ride a horse and play tennis. Like so many other English women of a certain age, she hoped her daughter would grow up and marry Prince Charles. “I said, ‘He’d never pick me! I’m American!,” she jokes, aware of the irony that the British royal’s son, Harry, grew up to do that very thing. She also inherited her mother’s British sensibilities. “If you’re brought up by an English parent, you don’t like to talk about yourself and it can give the impression you’re aloof,” she says. “But you’re just repressed! I think I was always more of a golden retriever than my mom wanted me to be.”

She eventually came into her own. Around age 13, she changed her name from Susan to Sigourney as a nod to a character in The Great Gatsby. (“It was long because I was long. I was too tall for ‘Sue.’”) Her parents called her “S” because she loved the initial. She attended college at Sarah Lawrence and Stanford University, majoring in English. She considered becoming a teacher or journalist. She graduated from Stanford with an English degree, then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale University School of Drama.

“My friends started hiring me in New York for their plays, but it took me about two years to realize I could say I was an actress and I could actually make a living, much to my parents’ surprise,” she says. “They thought I was too shy to do anything.” Her goal, she adds, was to portray roles of all different sizes and genres on the stage. When her film career took off, she set out to abide by the same model. She’s still a pro at picking top-notch stories, no matter the part. “If it’s a great juicy role [but a] shi–y script, then I’m never tempted,” she says.

ALIEN ENCOUNTER

But back in 1978, Weaver didn’t have any idea that the story about a group of space scavengers in peril was a future game-changer. “I didn’t want to do the movie,” she admits of Alien. The 20th Century Fox execs sent her to the wrong address for the audition, so she considered blowing it all off. But she finally showed up to her meeting with director Ridley Scott in “the highest heels ever” and brazenly told the director that she didn’t like the script because it was too bleak. “[My] casting director was in the corner making a face like, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’” she recalls.

Then Scott pulled out the designs of his space-set production—and it didn’t look like any other outer-space movie Weaver had ever seen. “The alien eggs had little baby faces on them, like chubby cheeks,” she says. “I knew I had never seen a movie that had looked anything like this.” Scott was so keen on Weaver getting the part of Ripley that when she flew out to London for her screen test, he had built a set just for her audition. “He fought hard for me because the studio didn’t want an unknown in the part,” she says.

A few female assistants were the deciding factor. Weaver adds, “The head of Fox watched the screen test in his office and turned to the secretaries and said, ‘Well, what did you think? Do you like her?’ And they said, ‘We like her, we think she’s great.’ They got me the part. Thank you, ladies!”

Weaver has vivid memories of what she dubs a mischievous production, particularly the infamous “chest burster” scene. “We get to the set and the crew is wearing these black raincoats,” she recalls. “We knew that something was going to come out of someone’s chest but we didn’t know what it was going to look like. My only line in the script was, ‘Oh, my God!’”

Sure enough, as British actor John Hurt lay on the table, the crew used hoses and tubes and other contraptions so a creature literally jumped out of him and “ran” across the room.

Weaver reenacts the entire sequence with hand motions. “The whole cast was in shock because we were convinced it was real!” she exclaims. “I still don’t know how they did it. At least [the director] was kind enough to make sure the blood didn’t spatter on me.”

Looking back, she says, “I was scared when I saw the movie. You know what scared me? The sound—and that you couldn’t hear everybody all the time. That’s like life.”

To this day, Weaver says she marvels at the science fiction genre, revisiting it in films such as Avatar and the Pixar classic Wall-E. “I’m not a snob about sci-fi,” she says. “They’re so ahead of their time because we’re still looking to the future and exploring what humans are going to be like. It’s always relevant.”

Her Ripley roles in the Alien franchise established her sci-fi cred, but she went on to star in several other well-received horror, sci-fi and scary-movie projects that also enhanced her reputation as a movie scream queen. In 2012, her cameo in the devilishly clever The Cabin in the Woods, a multilayered horror-movie homage, was a salute to her status in the genre.

AVATAR AND BEYOND

As she approaches her 70th birthday in October, Weaver says she’s fulfilled both on screen and off. She and her husband of 35 years, theater director Jim Simpson, now reside full-time in Manhattan after splitting their time on both coasts. Their daughter, Charlotte, is getting a dual master’s degree at the California Institute of the Arts in writing and interactive media. “She’s not in the industry, bless her heart,” Weaver says with a laugh. “It’s a nightmare for parents in the business when their child says, ‘I want to be in show business,’ because we really know what it entails.”

The couple enjoys spending time in Hawaii, where her mother-in-law still resides. (Simpson is a Hawaii native.) “We do a lot of snorkeling,” she says. “It’s so nice to be a normal human and to be able to hang my laundry. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I never get to do that.” She’s also involved in many environmental causes, including preserving clean water around the world.

She’ll soon head back to New Zealand, where she’s been at work filming the live and CGI portions of the long-awaited, effects-driven Avatar sequels. (Because her Avatar character died at the end of the 2009 original, she’ll be playing someone new in the next four installments, the first of which is scheduled for the big screen in 2021.) She’s also set to reunite with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in the new Ghostbusters, due July 2020. “It’s going to be crazy working with the guys again!” she says. She won’t reveal any details except to confirm she’s reprising her role as hauntee Dana Barrett.

Asked how she feels about getting older, Weaver responds without hesitation, “I love it.” No, really. “I enjoy working with younger people because I learn so much from them. And I like to bring in my own ways of doing things. I’m always on time. It’s important for older actors to show you’re always prepared. And I’m getting wonderful parts.”

For that, she thanks the very trait she used to hate: “I was never the babe or the beautiful ingénue or the love interest, because I was too tall. So I’ve always played interesting people, and that’s continued. It’s not like I suddenly have to figure out who I am now.”

And that’s why she’ll always stand tall in her heels and continue reaching for the stars. “My mother always said that I might not enjoy my height now, but someday I’ll be glad,” she says. “She was right.”

Sigourney Weaver Shares Some of Her Favorite Movie Memories

Ghostbusters (1984)

“I knew it would be big,” she says of the comedy blockbuster with two popular Saturday Night Live actors, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, and Meatballs, Caddyshack and Stripes writer and actor Harold Ramis. “The script was so funny and full of heart.” She played Dana, the first Ghostbusters customer, who later turned into the sinister gatekeeper Zuul. “Ghostbusters changed my life,” she says.

Gorillas in the Mist (1988)

The movie in which she portrayed American primatologist and conservationist Dian Fossey had a profound impact on her: “It wasn’t until Dian that I appreciated that animals have equal rights on this planet,” she says. She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for the role.

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Working Girl (1988)

Let the river run! Weaver says that director Mike Nichols offered her the role of conniving boss Katharine Parker “because he knew I’d love the comedy,” she says. And though the underdog-worker story is now some 30 years old, “the only thing that’s dated are the clothes. That’s how it should be.”

Dave (1993)

For all her East Coast aura, Weaver insists that she’s only played upper-crust society women in Working Girl and this light political comedy—in which she was the “unhappy” FLOTUS to Kevin Kline’s presidential imposter. “The costumes made me look extra dignified!” she says.

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A Map of the World (1999)

Weaver cites this indie drama as her most underrated work. She played a small-town nurse and mother who finds herself fighting child abuse charges. “She’s an amazing character but not sympathetic,” she explains. “The movie never got seen.”

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Avatar (2009)

Reuniting with her Aliens director James Cameron for this Oscar-winning 3D wonder, she starred as the doomed Dr. Grace Augustine on the lush alien world of Pandora. She says of the epic, “It’s a great adventure movie about so many things, including the health of the environment.” Plus, “We had so much fun filming it!”