It is almost 30 years since Sigourney Weaver first climbed into her space suit to play Ellen Ripley in Alien. But with the return of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa, Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4.0, not to mention Harrison Ford’s fourth outing as Indiana Jones, Weaver is also thinking about dusting off her action-hero boots and returning to the role that made her a household name.

“If Harrison can bring back Indiana Jones at 65, then anything is possible,” she says with a smile. “I would definitely do another if I had a director like Ridley Scott.”

She may be approaching her 60th birthday, but, like her male counterparts, Weaver shows no sign of slowing down. She is currently pressing ahead with plans to take her pilot’s licence. A recent mid-air emergency convinced her she’d rather be at the controls than in the passenger section. The plane she was travelling on suddenly dived 10,000ft, sending the oxygen masks dropping and the air stewardesses into a state of barely suppressed panic. “I was curiously calm, but what can you do?” she says.

In the course of her 40-year career, Weaver has not only slain aliens, she has also beaten ghosts (in Ghostbusters) and tamed gorillas (in Gorillas in the Mist). Yet she looks every inch the poised uptown Manhattan woman when I meet her at the Marrakesh film festival in the middle of a week-long tribute to her films. Her brown hair falls straight to her shoulders, her slim 6ft figure is in an immaculately fitted light blue suit (“Dior, on loan, like my dresses,” she says) and there’s some discreet but expensive-looking jewellery hanging from her ears and neck.

Descended from minor showbiz royalty, Weaver’s mother was Elizabeth Inglis, an English actress, her father was Pat Weaver, pioneering president of NBC television, and her uncle was Doodles Weaver, a comedian and radio star. She grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, surrounded by nannies and maids, but struggled with shyness.

Teased about her height and feeling gawky in comparison to her beautiful mother, Weaver nevertheless dreamt of a career on the stage. Aged 14, she began using the name Sigourney, rather than Susan, her more prosaic real name, after a character in The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald. She made her first profssional stage appearance at 16, but her parents were less than enthusiastic. “They both knew how tough a world acting could be — and I should have known, too,” she reflects. “So far as I was concerned as a kid, every father ran a TV network. You just don’t think, do you? I knew it was a rough business, but it was a great business.”

Despite her own and everyone else’s reservations, Weaver followed up an English degree at Stanford University with three years at the Yale School of Drama, but rarely landed the lead roles, mainly because she towered over all her male co-stars. She struggled to make a career until Woody Allen cast her in Annie Hall in 1977. It was a six-second appearance, but one that led to a meeting with Ridley Scott, then working through the script for Alien.

“I almost didn’t go along for the meeting,” she recalls. “I remember asking my agent, ‘Must I really do this?’ I went along, wearing over-the-knee hooker boots and must have looked 8ft tall. I think that because I didn’t care at all, he [Scott] offered me the role.”

It might have seemed like a ridiculous piece of sci-fi hokum at the time, but Weaver had the good sense to accept the part and Alien became the cinema sensation of 1979, spawning three sequels.

Now Weaver is more in demand than ever. She’s about to be seen in a rapid-fire succession of new films. Among them will be The Girl in the Park, a psychological thriller about a woman coping with the aftermath of her daughter’s abduction. Then James Cameron, the director who has not made a movie since Titanic, 11 years ago, has lined her up to play his female lead in Avatar. There’s even the possibility of her playing a mature burlesque stripper in the HBO production Gypsy and Me. “You cannot turn down these things,” she says airily. “You are lucky to see a couple of good scripts in a year, then a whole lot of them suddenly turn up. What am I going to do?”

She finds it hard to stay still for long. “I have this New York attitude to life,” she says. “I always want it now — or yesterday. I am trying to learn to be more mellow with age, but it is hard. I have always liked working hard and being involved in a lot of different projects. I was also a latecomer to everything — and that includes accepting that I am coming up to 60.”

She did not marry Jim Simpson, her husband of 24 years, until she was 34 and conceived her daughter Charlotte at 39. “I was shy in my twenties and it took a long time to get going on anything,” she explains. “But once I started, I couldn’t stop.”

She does karate, enjoys running and goes to the gym, “although not as often as I should”. “As for age, I am not going to start apologising,” she says forcefully. “That doesn’t cut any ice in Hollywood, of course, with its trophy wives, girlfriends half your age — at least — and facelifts. But Sophia Loren has been my inspiration. She is a woman who has never apologised for being herself.”

MY STUFF...

ON MY CD PLAYER

I play Middle Eastern music. I even asked for a radio in Marrakesh so I could listen to local stations. My daughter Charlotte is a drummer in a band and I like hearing her music

ON MY DVD PLAYER

Old ensemble comedies such as Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo. My screen heroines are people such as Sophia Loren and Jessica Tandy

I WOULD NEVER THROW AWAY

My mental pictures. I am not that organised to keep one thing. I have a constant mental picture of my daughter that I hope will never fade

SIGOURNEY WEAVER:

MY LIFE IN CARS

VW BEETLE

Weaver’s first car was an original Beetle, which she bought in her early twenties

THE ECTOMOBILE

This specially adapted 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor hearse was used in the 1984 film Ghostbusters starring Weaver

MERCEDES E 350

She uses this practical estate to negotiate the busy streets near her home in New York

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