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SIGOURNEY WEAVER`S CLOSE SHAVE

Ellen Ripley`s back and she`s got a problem. Make that a few problems.

She`s crashed on a lice-ridden planet. She`s landed in a 10-square-mile prison with a cult of monastic-minded criminals who have found religion and forsaken women. She`s the only woman within light years and she`s not exactly a sight for sore eyes. She`s tall, bruised and grimy. She`s got an alien on her tail. And she`s bald.

Maybe only Sigourney Weaver, the willowy actress who created the valiantly tough-minded Lt. Ellen Ripley as her first major film role in 1979`s ”Alien” and reprised it in 1986`s ”Aliens,” could have pulled this off. And maybe only Sigourney Weaver, having survived the real-life Hollywood horror of making the upcoming ”Alien,” could so intimately identify with Ripley`s latest travails.

”It`s just been a maelstrom,” says Weaver, with a weary shake of her head that sets gold Chanel earrings, shaped like miniature handbags, swinging beneath dark hair that has grown back into a short, curly crop. Folding her miniskirted, 5-foot, 11-inch frame into a chair at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here, she says, ”It`s a miracle to me that the film is really wonderful.”

Since she has just put the finishing touches only days ago on a film due to open in two weeks` time on Friday, it probably seems equally miraculous that there is a film at all.

In ”Alien 3,” Weaver landed in a movie with a history as acidically sticky as anything excreted by the alien itself. In the five-odd years since its conception, the film devoured some seven writers and three directors and so trampled its shooting schedule and estimated $50 million budget that Twentieth Century Fox halted production a year ago. Less than a month before its scheduled release, in fact, the movie`s actual ending remained in doubt.

Audience reaction, in sneak previews, Weaver says, was ”ambivalent.”

For ”emotional reasons, we felt we needed to give the audience one more thing to enhance the ending.”

The missing ingredient turned out to be six more seconds, drawn from the original script and shot at a price estimated at $500,000. The original ending is still there, says Weaver, but now, ”There`s like a period on it.”

There was never any doubt, however, about Ripley`s fate, according to Weaver. ”This is Ripley`s last one,” she says firmly.

”There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and confront the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien.”

This may be Ripley`s last stand, but it may be her finest one, according to Weaver.

”I always hope that the thing I`ve just done is my best work. I don`t want to sound conceited, but I think this is,” says the 42-year-old actress. ”I think it`s some of my most centered work. I think I`d be very sad if I`d done my last work as Ripley and not taken it to this extreme.”

The most extreme thing about this Ripley, superficially at least, is that she`s bald. In deference to the lice her character faces on the prison planet of Fiorina 161, Weaver kept her head shaved for five months on location in England, as did the rest of a cast that includes Charles Dutton and Charles Dance.

”It wasn`t my idea. It was Fincher`s idea,” says Weaver, referring to David Fincher, the film`s controversial 27-year-old director, whose prior directing experience was limited to well-regarded but decidedly shorter-form projects like Nike commercials and music videos for Madonna.

”It was actually very funny. He had just gotten the job about 20 seconds before and I was still a little nervous. We were sitting around with the Fox executives and producers and I said, `Well, Fincher, so how do you see the character of Ripley?`

”Fincher kind of looked at me. He`s a very funny guy and he`s very cute, too. He said, `So, how do you feel about being bald?`

”I looked at him and I looked at Roger Birnbaum (president of Fox`s world-wide production) and said, `Well, Roger, of course if I have to shave my head, I`ll have to ask for more money.` Which, of course, made them very nervous. It was a joke,” she says, quickly.

The question of salary, however, is no joke to Weaver. Although she feels that ”it`s in bad taste to talk about how much one is paid,” she makes it clear that she found her payment for the last two Alien films rather distasteful.

”I got paid not very much for the first two,” she says, noting that 70 percent of her $1 million fee for ”Aliens,” got eaten up by American and British taxes and the agent`s fee.

Although this time around she reportedly negotiated $4 million and a percentage of the film, she will only say that she did better than last time. ”Let`s put it this way: I didn`t get what Bruce Willis got for the second `Die Hard,` which is what I felt I should get,” she says, referring to Willis` reported rate of well over $5 million for a film that also caused overrun jitters at Fox. ”But I got enough to make me feel very happy with the small victory I felt I had made.

”No, I didn`t get my Lear jet, but then, I didn`t want a Lear jet,” she says archly, then breaks into a giggle.

What she did want, she says, was to develop the character of Ripley.

In the original ”Alien,” Weaver played a young lieutenant on an industrial spaceship, who sheds her naivete to display a bold brain and steely core that leaves her the only survivor of the crew`s first encounter with the alien.

Waking up after spending 57 years in hypersleep, adrift in an escape pod, the Ripley of the ”Aliens” sequel is made of even tougher stuff. Cynical, smart and very fit, she manages to make most of the men on board seem like posturing wimps, but still displays a tenderly fierce maternal impulse toward Newt, a little girl orphaned by the alien.

”In the second film, we left her with sort of everything ahead of her. She`d found this daughter and she had, perhaps, a fellow, maybe. And I think there was, at least on my part, an expectation that maybe she`d be able to lead a normal life. But, life not being fair, she doesn`t get to pursue that dream,” says Weaver.

The maternal storyline hits a dead end in ”Alien 3,” which, Weaver says approvingly, is much closer to the spirit and flavor of the first film.

She credits director David Fincher with that. ”Well, he`s amazing. He`s completely uncompromising,” she says, while admitting that, ”I was sort of the last person to jump on the Fincher bandwagon.

”I was just a little wary because I wanted very much to break new ground with Ripley. You know, you never know with these sorts of geniuses where their attention is going to go,” she says, carefully. ”But, Fincher, particularly, I think, blew us all away by being such a committed actors` director and so patient. And I think we did break new ground with Ripley.

”I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways.”

Weaver`s Ripley fills the screen with her wide, dark eyes and delicately stubborn chin. She can freeze blood with a contemptuous glance and set it racing again with trembling lips in a jaw set with determination. Even bald and dressed in floppy, dun-colored prison uniforms, Ripley radiates a raw, classy coolness mingled with a bruised sensuality.

There is an elegant irony in the fact that Weaver-daughter of former NBC president Sylvester Weaver and the well-bred product of exclusive Manhattan private schools with degrees from Stanford University and the Yale Drama School-once dismissed by casting agents as being too aristocratic, too classy and too ”Bryn Mawr” should wind up epitomizing what Australian director Peter Weir once called a ”brainy, female-hunk physicality,” and what Weaver herself has dubbed ”Rambolina.”

When the lean, mean Ripley of ”Aliens,” stripped down to little more than well-toned muscles and a light coat of sweat, battled the Alien Queen for the child, Newt, engaging her with the battle cry,”Get away from her, you bitch,” audiences cheered.

Weaver`s primal machisma in that film forged a link in a chain of powerfully unprettified female roles that included Linda Hamilton`s pumped-up mother in ”Terminator 2” and Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in ”Thelma and Louise.”

Although the media made much of Hollywood`s new macho women, Weaver is unimpressed. ”I guess I don`t think of film as an innovative medium. I guess I feel that film kind of caught up to what`s been happening to women for the last 20 years.

”Women are doing every kind of job and, traditionally, in my opinion, have been incredibly heroic in protecting their families, caring for them and surviving alone. I guess I have a very heroic image of women in general.

”I think the more we can liberate film from its limited impressions of who women are, the better. You know, people criticize `Thelma and Louise,`

saying, `Oh, but it`s just a female buddy movie.` But I just saw it very recently and I was so struck by how those actresses, and Ripley, had made those people so specific. I`ve tried to figure out why there`s this plethora of action films and women have no place in them. I think it`s some sort of perverse chivalry,” she says wryly.

”With the `60s and the `70s, television gave people a real appetite for violence and slickness. And, for a long time, there was a reluctance to put women in that world. Now, we`ve sort of forced our way in-and I don`t think we`re going to leave.”