The biggest regret of Sigourney Weaver’s career: “That would’ve been really fun”
As the daughter of a TV executive and an actor, Sigourney Weaver was always going to end up in the entertainment business. At an early age, she decided to be a performer, starring in a series of plays at her various schools, including Yale University. She served as an understudy in a show starring the great John Gielgud but was tempted away by the allure of the silver screen. Two years after her movie debut—a minor role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall—she landed the starring role in a little film called Alien. You might have heard of it.
She might have eventually made her name in Hollywood, but Weaver still feels a strong connection to the stage. In 2025, she made her West End debut in a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a performance that was notably interrupted by climate protestors. According to an interview with Elle, the Ghostbusters star wishes she had followed her theatrical passions a little more keenly.
“I wish I’d studied singing more,” she confessed. “I really loved the cabaret act I used to do with Chris Durang, and then Sondheim would ask me to do something, and I felt I didn’t have a trained voice, so I wouldn’t be able to do eight shows a week. So I wish I’d done more singing and more dancing. I would’ve loved to have had a Vegas show. That would’ve been really fun.”
Christopher Durang was a famous playwright who knew Weaver from their time at Yale. He cast her in some of his earliest plays, often making her do absurd things in the name of art. Weaver, Durang, and fellow student Meryl Streep all appeared in the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, a musical the stage icon had written while he, too, was studying at the great institution.
A quick glance at Weaver’s filmography will show you that she isn’t lying about having rarely done anything musical. She turns up as a talking head in the Ron Howard The Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years, and she lends her voice to My Depression (The Up and Down and Up of It), an animated short that makes use of musical numbers to tell its story. Other than that, there’s barely more than a whistle to be heard across her legendary career.
She might not have done many musicals, but Weaver’s stage career is long and prolific. Even after her rise to prominence, she has returned to the theatre on numerous occasions. In 1985, she was nominated for the Tony Award for ‘Best Featured Actress in a Play’, following her performance in the dark comedy Hurlyburly.
After a brief spell away from the medium in the 1990s, she settled back into a regular routine, The Tempest being the latest in a long line of productions. Sadly, her portrayal of Prospero did not go down well with critics. Maybe if there had been more space for expressing her vocal chops and prancing the stage, they would have reacted more fondly.
Given how well her career has been without it, Weaver shouldn’t worry too much about not having trained in singing and dancing. However, if she had pursued this skill set, it would have added an entirely new dimension to her films. Imagine Weaver and the Xenomorph doing the ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ routine from Young Frankenstein. That would have been incredible.
