As Linda Hamilton returns to the blockbusting franchise, it’s now clear that it was she, not Schwarzenegger, who changed the action movie for ever
It is 35 years since Sarah Connor and the Terminator’s eyes first met across a dark 80s nightclub, shortly followed by his red laser sight meeting her forehead. They have had their ups and down since: attempting to destroy each other in the first movie; teaming up again seven years later to avert Judgment Day in Terminator 2; then being torn apart by the increasingly erratic Terminator timeline. But as they meet again at last, in the new Terminator: Dark Fate, it is striking how much of Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lives came to be shaped by these roles – albeit in very different ways.
It was at Hamilton’s urging that James Cameron refashioned Sarah Connor between Terminators 1 and 2, from damsel-in-distress to muscular, shotgun-pumping, commando tiger mom (Cameron did much the same for Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens). Action cinema was never the same again. Hamilton had recently divorced and given birth to her first child, so she was in the mood for a transformation. It worked so well, she and Cameron became a couple and had a daughter together. “I think what happened there is that he really fell in love with Sarah Connor,” Hamilton recalled in a recent
New York Times interview, “and I did, too.” After T2, Hamilton wanted to branch out and make comedies, but she was only offered more action roles. She and Cameron separated in 1999. Not unlike Connor herself, Hamilton practically became a recluse.