"I prefer not to have any image, or any one image," she says, now curled on a couch in a suite at the hotel and sheathed in black, one shoulder bared. "It's because I come from the theater originally. My dream, when I was a young actor, was to be in a repertory company, where you could play the maid in one piece and then play the leading lady in another, and go from comedy to drama and really hop all over the place. And I actually realized a long time ago that you can't expect anything to happen; you can't expect anyone else to know what you want, where you want to go next. So I guess what I'm always doing is trying to create this mini-rep company in my head."

“I changed my name when I was about twelve because I didn't like being called Sue or Susie. I felt I needed a longer name because I was so tall. So what happened? Now everyone calls me Sig or Siggy.”

“Quickly, in one glance, you begin to understand why, as a tall girl, she was called Amazon by her boarding-school classmates and why, as a beautiful girl, she resented it -- so much so that by her father's account, she went and changed her name from Susan to the more stylish Sigourney, lifting it from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.”

“People don't remember that Sigourney has been one of the first serious actors able to piece together a career that incorporated every aspect of the movie-making spectrum," Mr. Schamus says. "People thought that Bruce Willis had broken that ground in Pulp Fiction. Excuse me? She's been doing this all her life.”

“I had such great teachers in high school who made me feel like I could do anything. Then to go to Yale, where these drama teachers made me feel like shit—if I have any advice for young people, it would be, "Don't listen to teachers who say, 'You're really not good enough.' " Just teach me. Don't tell me if you think I'm good enough or not. I didn't ask you. Teachers who do that should be fired.”

“I’d send out an intergalactic invitation to other species. I guarantee they would not be like the aliens in the movies I did. I think if they can get here, they could be charming. Stephen Hawking said aliens would be coming for our resources. Well, I don’t know what planet he’s talking about, we don’t have any resources to give them! We’re plundering our own planet. Unless garbage and plastic is something they need, in which case, we could work out a good deal.”