80s movie icon claims her height ‘protected’ her-Tori Brazier at Venice Film Festival and Pierra Willix-Entertainment – Metro

Sigourney Weaver has said her height helped ‘protect’ her as an actress (Picture: Gisela Schober/ Getty Images)

Hollywood movie legend Sigourney Weaver has claimed that her height helped ‘protect’ her as an actress.

The Alien star, 74, is currently at Venice Film Festival, where she was honoured with the prestigious Golden Lion career achievement award during the opening ceremony on Tuesday night.

Weaver – real name Susan – is famous for her breakthrough role as Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic, one of the first times a female actor was cast in an action hero type of role.

She has gone on to appear in other movies such as Ghostbusters, Working Girl, Gorillas in the Mist and Avatar.

Another thing the star is famous for is her statuesque height – standing at a shade under 5 foot 11 inches, as she confirmed to the audience at her Venice masterclass, attended by Metro.co.uk.

She also spoke about how she saw her height, which she has been since she was 11, as an advantage rather than a disadvantage during her career.

She considers her height to have been an advantage (Picture: Karwai Tang/ WireImage)

‘I was like a big spider knocking into everything. I was the person they put on the basketball team and then went, oh my god, what have we done?’ she joked of her long limbs as a youngster.

But in terms of her professional acting, she added: ‘I actually think it’s protected me, because it made me feel like I was right for character parts.’

As well as meaning the two-time Oscar nominee didn’t slot herself into bland leading role archetypes, it also helped her gauge industry situations.

‘Casting me was not a conventional decision. Often when I was in Hollywood, as soon as I walked in the room, all the producers would sit down. Al Pacino would sit down.

Her breakthrough role was as Ripley in 1979’s Alien (Picture: 20th Century Fox)

‘Nobody wanted to look short, and that was sort of how I took the temperature of the room.’

In the masterclass Weaver admitted she wasn’t a fan of the number of guns Alien director James Cameron had included in the script for the 1979 sequel when she first read it nearly 40 years ago.

‘The one thing, of course, I wasn’t thrilled about was all the guns. I read very quickly because I’m trying to experience the story and I had left out reading a lot of the stage directions, which had a lot of guns in them,’ she said.

Sigourney then appeared in the Ghostbusters sequel (Picture: Columbia/ Kobal/ Rex/ Shutterstock)

When the director brought a selection of guns to set she was taken aback and told him she was ‘for gun control’ and would ‘not be picking up a gun and doing anything with it’.

‘He said, “Well, you haven’t read the script.” I said, “I have, but I haven’t read all those paragraphs about guns.”‘

However after Cameron took her ‘out into the back field and had me shoot off a couple hundred rounds of this machine gun’ she found the experience ‘unfortunately very addictive’.

Although Weaver said the use of guns wasn’t her ‘first choice’, she understood why Cameron wanted the character to use the weapons to defend herself.

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