Sigourney Weaver thought she was far too homely to be an actress, says Olga Craig in the London Daily Telegraph. “I was teased at school for being a too-tall beanpole and I yearned to be the pretty one. When I was about 8 I asked my mom if I was pretty. She said, ‘No dear, you’re just plain.’ That was, well, hard. My mother meant well; she was worried her kids would grow up conceited. She said it for the best of reasons. But I became a really awkward teenager. I thought, Gosh, if my mother doesn’t think I’m pretty, I had better crawl under the couch.” Things didn’t improve when Weaver studied drama at Yale. “I was never going to be a producer’s dream—a petite, blue-eyed blonde.” In fact, her teachers told her she would never find work. “It was tough to hear that. I had no confidence. You think, Well, if my teachers don’t think I have any talent then I mustn’t have any talent.” Only after Weaver underwent “lots and lots of therapy” did her self-confidence improve, and only after she became a household name in films like Alien, Ghostbusters, and Dave did her teachers change their tune. “They took back the mean things they said. Eventually.”