Navigator Lambert
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Lambert (ID# 971/L6-02P) was the navigator on the commercial towing vessel Nostromo in the 1979 science fiction film Alien. She was played by actress Veronica Cartwright.
As navigator, Lambert was in charge of duties such as calculating the ship's position, measuring times and distances, locating signals and their sources, and making docking preparations.
Lambert was the first to surmise that the unknown transmission being received by the Nostromo was a voice (although this scene, deleted from the theatrical release, is shown only in the Special Edition). Lambert was also one of the three crewmembers who went on the away expedition to the Derelict spacecraft along with Dallas and Kane. In another deleted scene from the Special Edition, Lambert slapped Ripley for not allowing the three expedition members back on board after Kane was attacked.
Once the Nostromo crew had been reduced to four, (Ripley, Lambert, Ash, and Parker), Lambert suggested that the crew abandon ship instead of following Dallas's plan to flush the alien out of the airducts. Indeed, this was the course of action finally adopted.
Lambert was supposed to be a character that the film's audience could identify with. She had the habit of saying what everyone was thinking at the time, (both onscreen and in the audience). After Kane's death, she appeared as though she was always crying, though in varying amounts. She also smoked many tobacco cigarettes.
Lambert was the last character to be killed by the alien, though it was only shortly after Parker's death. The alien appeared while she and Parker were gathering coolant bottles for the escape ship's life support system. She became paralysed with fear, unable to move due her utter terror. Her death was heard (by Ripley and the audience) through the Nostromo's intercom system, but it was not seen on screen. It is supposed that she was either slain and eaten or captured and cocooned, as Dallas and Brett had been; another theory (supported by the DVD-commentary) says she was actually raped by the Alien, regarding the Alien's way of approaching her, it's general depiction as a very sexual being and Lambert's distinctive screams heard via intercom.
Like the Nostromo itself, Lambert and all other crewmembers' official whereabouts remained unknown for the next 57 years. She was missing and presumed dead from 2122 until 2179, when an off-course Narcissus escape ship returned Ripley and Jones the cat to civilization (and solved the riddle of the missing Nostromo, which had mysteriously vanished without a trace).
[edit] Trivia
In the director audio commentary for the DVD edition of the film, Ridley Scott explains that he felt that in the future heterosexuality or homosexuality would both be seen as normal and that regardless of a person's sexual orientation people in space would tend to have more casual affairs. He said that had he done the film again he would have created the Navigator Lambert to be bisexual or a lesbian.
Also, according to Veronica Cartwright, Lambert's fate was the following: As the Alien kills Parker, Lambert crawled into a nearby locker and died of fright as the Alien approaches her. In fact, her death scene was never completed and Cartwright didn't know exactly what happened to Lambert until she saw the film (they didn't have a premiere; she stood on line and bought her own ticket like the rest of the general public). As for the sequence where the Alien's tail snaked between her legs and up her back, those legs actually belonged to Brett (Harry Dean Stanton); Lambert wore cowboy boots whereas Brett wore sneakers. In fact, the comic adaptation of the movie actually showed that it was Brett who was stabbed in the back and the alternate deleted scenes of Brett being killed clearly showed that the Alien had its tail lodged into his back.
In the novelization of Alien by Alan Dean Foster, it is presumed that Lambert is paralyzed by the Alien and killed when the Alien attempts to escape into the air ducts carrying both Parker and Lambert. When Ripley arrives, she sees what's left of the Alien's attempt to 'force' the two bodies into the ships air ducts.
In one of the easter eggs on the film's 20th anniversary DVD, Lambert's bio listed her as a natural female (hinting that transexualism is quite common in the future) hailing from Canada, and that her first and middle initials were J.M. (perhaps Jeanne-Marie?). She was divorced twice.
