The Venice Film Festival officially kicked off Wednesday evening with an emotional Sigourney Weaver receiving the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award. Enthused Weaver from the Lido’s Sala Grande stage, “I want to roar!” The three-time Oscar nominee thanked the festival for what she called a “jet-fuel of encouragement,” adding, “I can’t believe I’m here.”
Weaver praised the festival for its “pride of Golden Lions,” saying her statue will be sitting next to her on the plane home and quipping, “My husband will have to get used to having it in bed with me.”
The tribute came during the opening ceremony for the 81st annual Venice fest, which opened tonight with the world premiere of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
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During the Weaver tribute, a videotape message had previously been sent from Weaver’s Aliens and Avatar director James Cameron who wished her “massive congratulations.” He continued, “I am blessed to know her as a friend … our working bond of trust and respect has only gotten stronger with every new project.”
He further noted that Weaver received her first Academy Award nomination for their first collaboration, 1986’s Aliens, and said she is “way overdue for that Oscar.”
In her acceptance, Weaver thanked Cameron for the message and also had special praise for her Year of Living Dangerously director Peter Weir who is also receiving a career achievement Lion during the festival. Weir made her “fall in love with film,” she said.
Continuing, the actress whose remarkable range of films also includes Ghostbusters, Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl, added, “I have been able to soar all over the world like a hummingbird, darting through time and space and genre, managing to elude whatever box Hollywood might want to put me in… or maybe i’m just too tall.”
Earlier in the day, Weaver welled up when responding to a reporter who linked her role as Ripley in Alien to U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Weaver considered the thought and tears filled her eyes as she said, “We’re all so excited about Kamala and to think for one moment that my work would have anything to do with her rise makes me very happy, actually, because it’s true. I have so many women who come and thank me.”
The New Yorker this evening becomes only the third American actress ever to receive Venice’s career award after Jane Fonda and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Deadline recently sat down with Weaver her for a wide-ranging Q&A; you can read that feature here.
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