Sigourney digs deep

One person very close to her was pushing Sigourney Weaver to take her latest movie role - her 13-year-old daughter Charlotte.

The youngster read Louis Sachar's best-selling novel Holes and fell in love with it. "She held it up and said, 'mommy, you have to read this book and you should play the part of The Warden because she's a great character'," recalls Weaver.

Her daughter's intuition paid off, and the film version has given the actress one of her biggest US hits in years. She plays the sadistic warden of a detention centre who makes the juvenile inmates dig holes all day in soaring temperatures.

Playing a villainous character was tougher than Weaver expected. "I found it really hard because my character is willing to sacrifice these boys," she says.

"As a mother who spends a lot of time with my daughter and her young friends, it's very hard to put that aside and play someone who doesn't have that sensitivity that I do. So I do think that motherhood changes the way you look at parts."

Weaver has become one of Hollywood's leading actresses in the years since first attracting attention as Ripley in Alien, 25 years ago. Next week, that picture is being re-released, in a director's cut reworked by Ridley Scott.

She says her favourite role is that of devoted mother and wife. She and theatre director Jim Simpson have been married for nearly 20 years, something she attributes to her love of domesticity and refusal to uproot from her birthplace of New York to Hollywood.

"It's the only life I know, apartment life," she says of the Big Apple. "I would say sometimes I used to consider moving out to the countryside, but never LA. Then after 9/11, I never want to leave again. I just want to stay there and put my arms around all the buildings and protect the city.

"And, being a mother, being domestic at home, that's my favourite thing. Just being a mom. That's the centre of my life.

"What happens as a mother is that you don't want to leave home a lot, so as an actress you're very picky about what you do. I love to stay home and cook. I know all the good English recipes because my mother was from England."

Her daughter's musical tastes have had an influence too, turning Weaver into a big Eminem fan. "He's an amazing poet. He tells stories with his songs. It's fascinating and he does it so well," she says.

"I don't mind my daughter listening to his lyrics, she's a wise creature. We can talk about what he's saying in the songs and why he's saying all those mean things to his mother.

"We can figure out what's behind that. So I don't think these songs should be outlawed because they're here to teach lessons."

Weaver herself became a feminist icon after kicking alien butt as Ripley, the first in a new generation of tough action women on the big screen. "I'm glad to see that nowadays having women heroes is not as uncommon as it used to be," she says. "It's taken a long time for women to be physical in movies and still attractive. Ripley stands out because it's much more to do with the character that makes her heroic. She does physical things but is also thinking about other people."

She wouldn't object to returning to Ripley for a fifth Alien film. "In these times especially, it wouldn't be a bad idea to go to another planet, to have an adventure and see characters prevail. It would be very powerful to have an older Ripley still be strong because people become more of who they really are as they become older."

At 54, she puts down her still-stunning appearance to "good genetics", a regime of Pilates and aerobics, walking around her native New York - but, above all, being very happy with her lot.

"I love that my husband is working in such a wonderful theatre in New York, and my daughter is going to a wonderful school and doing a lot of horse-riding. I get awful lot of pleasure from what my family are doing," she says.

l Holes (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow (Friday).

* Alien The Director's Cut (18) opens on August 31.

Published: 23/10/2003