The fictional character Ellen Ripley is the protagonist in the Alien movie series. She is played by Sigourney Weaver. Warrant Officer Ripley was heralded as a seminal role for challenging gender stereotypes, particularly in the science fiction genre, and remains Weaver's most famous role to date.

Fictional biography

Ripley was born January 7, 2092 on Earth. At the age of 19, she had a daughter, Amanda Ripley MacLaren (b. 24 June 2111).

In 2122, Ripley was employed as a Warrant Officer for the Weyland-Yutani corporation, working on the USCSS Nostromo, which was towing massive quantities of raw ore to Earth from Thedus. Along with the rest of the crew, she was awakened ten months prematurely by Mother, the ship's computer, to answer a curious transmission received from planet LV-426.

Ripley initially refused to allow back onto the ship the injured Executive Officer Kane, Captain Dallas, and Navigator Lambert, citing quarantine regulations. Her order was ignored by Science Officer Ash, whom she began to mistrust more and more as time went on. Following the (presumed) death of Dallas, she learned from Mother the final piece of the puzzle: Special Order 937 had sealed their fate. With the crew around her dwindling just as quickly as the creature seemed to be growing, Ripley began the vessel's self-destruct sequence. The Nostromo, the cooling rods removed from its reactor, melted down and imploded violently, moments after Ripley (in the escape ship Narcissus) reached safety. In finally destroying the Alien, however, she fired the Narcissus rockets, blasting the ship far off course for any hope of a timely rescue. Thus, she and Jones the cat would spend the next 57 years in hypersleep, following the incidents depicted in Alien, 1979.

Officially, the whereabouts of the Nostromo and her crew remained unknown; it simply never returned from its journey to Thedus, and was listed as missing and presumed destroyed. Ripley's only daughter, Amanda, died 23 December 2177, at the age 67, just two years before Ripley would be found and awoken from hypersleep.

After her subsequent rescue by a salvage crew in 2179, Ripley was made a Lieutenant and returned with a team of Colonial Marines to LV-426, as portrayed in Aliens, 1986. Ripley subsequently found herself marooned on Fiorina 'Fury' 161, an outer veil mineral ore refinery and correctional facility, where she died sometime in 2179 while trying to prevent Weyland-Yutani from getting its hands on the alien queen embryo that was inside of her. (See Alien³, 1992.)

Various clones of Ellen Ripley were later created for the purpose of experimentation with the alien. (See Alien Resurrection, 1997.)

Ripley's life and career has been extensively expanded on in various spin-off comics and novels, many of which discount her death on Fury 161, instead providing a chronology continuing on from the end of Aliens. As such, they are not generally considered Canon.