The Only Major Actors Still Alive From 1979's Alien
"Alien" is a watershed horror and science-fiction film; many have tried to recapture its foreboding magic but director Ridley Scott is confident no one can beat his classic.
The film follows the seven-person crew of the space mining vessel Nostromo; in the 22nd century, space travel is the job of regular working Joes. They pick up a distress signal and, in investigating, pick up an eighth passenger: the titular beast, a phallic and half-cybernetic horror spawned from a human (specifically John Hurt's Kane) but utterly devoid of humanity. The alien blends into the leaky, industrial hull of the Nostromo, and as it picks off the crew one by one, their goal shifts from destroying it to escaping it.
Next year marks the 45th birthday of "Alien," but it still holds up no matter its age. However, in the decades since its release, more than half the cast has passed on. This makes watching a film about their slow but inevitable deaths all the more eerie. Thankfully, a handful of the cast are still with us.
Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley)
The accidental star of "Alien" is Sigourney Weaver, who plays the only (human) survivor of the Nostromo, Ellen Ripley. She stuck with the franchise, coming back for "Aliens" in 1986, "Alien 3" in 1992, and finally "Alien: Resurrection" in 1997, each one under the helm of a different director.
Weaver (born October 8, 1949) is much more than Ripley, though; she's one of the best actors alive. She was one of the biggest movie stars of the '80s and '90s and continues to work regularly to this day. Her work oscillates between dramatic films, like "The Ice Storm," to comedies, like Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters" and "Dave" or "Galaxy Quest," to other science-fiction films — she reunited with "Aliens" director James Cameron on "Avatar" and "Avatar: The Way of Water." She's likewise worked as a voice actor for animated works and dabbled in television (see her hilarious voice acting turn as a yandere spaceship in "Futurama" episode "Love and Rockets").
Perhaps because her breakout part was a tough-as-nails final girl, Weaver has always had a sterner presence than most leading actresses of her caliber. She can be sexy, sure, but is never vulnerable because of it.
Despite her long-running career, Weaver has only been nominated for three Oscars, and somehow never won, in a fairly narrow window of time. Namely, Best Actress in 1987 for "Aliens" and then, in 1989, Best Actress for "Gorillas in the Mist" and Best Supporting Actress in "Working Girl." Yes, she's just that good.
Tom Skerritt (Captain Arthur Dallas)
Captain Dallas is the third one to bite it at the Xenomorph's hands after he tries to kill it with a flamethrower. It's a clever genre subversion — the one who seems the most like a sci-fi action hero is dead about halfway through — which leads the rest of the characters to truly realize they're screwed.
Dallas' actor Tom Skerritt, though, is still with us at the ripe old age of 90 (he was born on August 25, 1933). He's had a respectable career since, both on film and in television. In the former, he had supporting parts in "The Dead Zone," "Top Gun," "Steel Magnolias" and Robert Redford's "A River Runs Through It" (as the reverend father of Norman McLean, the source material book's author and protagonist). Of that latter experience, Skerritt said to MTV: "It turned out every way I hoped it would, and that would mean it would be a classic film. These films hold up forever. You can look at them again and they'll always touch you on a different level."
Standouts of Skerritt's TV work include "Cheers," where he had a recurring part in season 6, and "Picket Fences," which netted him an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1993.
He's still working in the 2020s, too, with a recent credit as the lead of the 2021 indie film "East of the Mountains."
Veronica Cartwright (Joan Lambert)
Unlike her castmates, Veronica Cartwright (who played Lambert) had experience fighting malicious aliens; she starred in Philip Kaufman's 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" remake. In that one, she's the only survivor (the famous ending of Donald Sutherland pointing and screaming? Cartwright's character is the one he's doing it to). Lighting didn't strike twice, as Lambert meets an ugly end in "Alien." Cartwright (born April 20, 1949), though? She's still with us.
A child actress who grew up in the business (see her younger self in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"), Cartwright appeared in a few more classic films after "Alien." Among them were Philip Kaufman's 1983 "The Right Stuff" and George Miller's 1987 "The Witches of Eastwick."
However, television is where she's mostly carved out her niche; since the 1990s, she's been a regular guest player on network TV programs. Her credits include "ER," "The X-Files" (these two collectively netted her three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Guest in a Drama Series), "Six Feet Under, "Law & Order: SVU," "CSI," and "Supernatural." Her latest credit was on, of all things, "Gotham Knights" — the CW's swiftly-canceled, Batman-adjacent series.