Three Movies and an Empty Nest for Sigourney Weaver

April 24, 2008 — -- She has slain aliens, battled ghosts and sparred with a big-haired underling gunning for her job.

But Sigourney Weaver, the 5-foot-11½ star of "Alien," "Ghostbusters" and "Working Girl," is getting ready to cope with something entirely out of this world: empty-nest syndrome. Her daughter, Charlotte Simpson, 18, leaves for college in the fall, a prospect that leaves Weaver, 58, stunned.

"Oh, my God," she says, shaking her head. "But it's very exciting."

On the plus side is plenty of work and a potential trip to Southeast Asia with her husband, director Jim Simpson.

"When you're a working mother, the guilt is enormous. And to not have that, to actually be able to work and not feel that tug all the time, would be great," says Weaver, who's shooting Tim Allen's directorial debut comedy "Crazy on the Outside" and recently wrapped James Cameron's "Avatar." "It's worse for me than for her. She's fine without me. You just feel like your place is at home. She was my only one because I got started late, so I wanted to stay home and have fun with her."

Being a mom enabled Weaver to relate to Chaffee Bicknell, an unusually fertile woman who runs a surrogacy agency in "Baby Mama." It opens Friday.

In her exceedingly polite, genteel way, Weaver cracks a dry joke: "Around the corner, I'm sure there's a building going up now for busy New York women who don't have time to carry a child."

Weaver's Chaffee, who keeps getting pregnant despite being long in the tooth, pairs the baby-mad but reproductively challenged Tina Fey with Amy Poehler as her surrogate.

"It's such an intimate portrait of both of these women in a loving way," Weaver says. "Chaffee seems really nurturing but has this thing, 'Not me, I don't need this stuff.' I don't know why they wanted me to play this terrifying woman."

Actually, says writer/director Michael McCullers, "Sigourney was our first and only choice. I knew she'd bring a certain presence to the role. She's tall and elegant and beautiful. You have to believe what this woman is saying."