by Michael Hogg

Created on: February 22, 2009

Imagine for a moment you're a young girl living far from home with your family on a deep space rock in the cosmos equivalent of the middle of nowhere. Your name is Rebecca and you're bright, doing well at what passes for school out here and just generally living your childhood as best you can in circumstances that would be hard on any youngster. Your father is a prospector, looking for ore deposits and so forth and accompanying him out into the wastelands surrounding the colony one day suddenly you have to deal with the sorts of things no-one should have to deal with, let alone a small child.

You have to watch as all around you the entire colony is wiped out by a relentless alien lifeform which multiplies and grows at incredible speed. You see the lucky people being killed outright while a far worse fate awaits those who are taken alive by the creatures. As the human resistance collapses, you have to retreat to the air recycling system to hide and attempt to survive, knowing at any time you might attract the attention of the aliens and face the same fate you witnessed your family suffer. Then after a pause, more humans show up and you have to face it all again.

I am of course talking about Carrie Henn's spellbinding performance as Rebecca "Newt" Jordan in the 1986 action horror classic Aliens. A followup to the worldbeating original, it saw Sigourney Weaver reprise the role that made her name as Ellen Ripley, returning as an adviser to LV426, the planetoid which spawned the horror which has kept her awake ever since her rescue. Upon arrival on the planet, one of the first things to happen is the discovery of Newt in the now abandoned living quarters of the colony and as the movie progresses and the marine detachment she is advising is decimated, it more or less becomes a story of the survival of Ripley and Newt.

The performance of both is spot on. Henn plays the deeply traumatised and scarred child who has been forced to grow up far beyond her years, yet still yearns for the safety of the mother figure Ripley becomes brilliantly while Weaver's tale of missing the lifetime of her own daughter who lived and died while she was lost floating in suspended animation after the events of the first movie and therefore feeling ultra-protective of young Newt makes their joint performance compelling.

Henn won the Saturn Award for "Best Performance By A Younger Actor" in 1987 as well as being nominated for the Young Artist Award but never really acted again, becoming an elementary teacher in California after leaving school.

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