She’s slain aliens and become them. As a part of Ghostbusters, she proved herself capable of scuffling with the scariest foe. Maybe too capable. At her full height, Sigourney Weaver stands at roughly six feet, a feature she not only felt insecure about but felt kept her from landing roles as the “babe” of the film.
Since her teenage years, Alien star Weaver dreamed of pursuing drama and developed an early interest in performing arts as an early teen. However, her height left Weaver feeling like “a giant spider,” to the point she took an extreme measure, changing her very identity, to address her height insecurity.
Sigourney Weaver grew up and entered Hollywood feeling very insecure about her height
Reportedly, by the age of 11, Weaver reached 5 feet and 10 inches tall, and at the peak of her height, she reached a solid six feet. Her self-esteem took a significant blow, leaving the aspiring actress lacking “the confidence to ever think I could act.”
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So, she tried addressing the issue in one of the few ways she saw as feasible. She changed her name. Weaver was born as Susan Alexandra Weaver and changed to Sigourney, taking the name from The Great Gatsby.
“I was about 6ft tall and called Susie or Sue,” Weaver recalled. “I felt too tall to have a short name like that and saw ‘Sigourney’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby. “I thought: ‘I will use it until I figure out what to do with my name.’ It became an in-joke with my family. My father started signing himself in letters to me ‘Drad’ instead of Dad, because I’d changed my name.”
Even after changing her name, she felt judged for her appearance
Weaver would try a variety of tricks besides changing her name, but there was only so many ways to conceptually shrink one’s self in an industry where men didn’t like standing next to a woman potentially standing a head above them.
“I once offered to paint my shoes on my bare feet to get one part,” admitted Weaver, “because it made me appear shorter.”
“Producers are short and I was never their sexual fantasy,” she mused. “As for actors, if I enter a room and an actor stands up then immediately sits back down, I hear myself saying, ‘This job isn’t for me.’”
Weaver is content with the jobs she has landed, calling her roles “wonderful,” even as she acknowledges, “I was never the babe or the beautiful ingenue or the love interest, because I was too tall. I’ve always played interesting people, and that’s continued.”
