Sarah Connor (1959-1997) is a fictional character, the heroine in the first two entries in the Terminator film series. She is played by American actress Linda Hamilton.
.jpg?lang=en)
Character history
Template:Spoiler In The Terminator, Sarah Connor is a young waitress who finds herself pursued by a relentless cyborg killer, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 800 Series Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), for reasons completely unknown to her. She is soon approached by Kyle Reese, who explains that in the future, an artificial intelligence called Skynet will be created by military software developers to make strategic decisions. The program becomes self-aware, seizes control of most of the world's military hardware (including various highly-advanced robots), and launches an all-out attack on human beings. However, a man named John Connor eventually leads the human Tech-Com resistance to victory, only to discover that in a last-ditch effort Skynet had researched time travel and sent a robotic killer back in time to destroy John Connor's family before he can be born. John Connor, of course, is Sarah's future son, and Connor sends back a trusted lieutenant (Reese) to protect his mother at all costs.
The plot is summed up by these lines spoken by Reese, who tells Sarah Connor:
- "Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!'"
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, two robots travel back from the future this time: one to kill Sarah's son John (now ten years old, played by Edward Furlong), and one to rescue him. The twist (given away by the movie's advance publicity) is that this time Schwarzenegger's character (another T-800) is the rescuer, having been re-programmed by John Conner to protect his younger self from the more advanced prototype T-1000 (Robert Patrick) that has been sent to kill him. The newer robot's liquid metal construction gives it the ability to change shape, an ability which was the focus of many of the movie's Oscar-winning special effects.
In some ways, Terminator 2 is a character study of Sarah Connor. She is a quite different person from the frail woman in the first Terminator film; her entire perspective on life has been irreversibly altered by the events in her life. The knowledge she has about mankind's future has made her ever vigilant, a trait which is perceived by many as paranoia and psychosis; At the outset of this film, Sarah is in a mental institution following a botched attempt to bomb the Cyberdyne building. Her knowledge of the future is also a source of recurring nightmares, as well as a great deal of antagonism, which results in the doctors overseeing her "recovery" to place her under maximum security. However, she cannot be contained for long and manages several tries to escape; her latest attempt coincides with the second T-101 and her son John arriving to break her out of the hospital. During their escape, Sarah's lead Doctor is horrified to see both Terminators in operation and realizes Sarah's predictions were true.
Sarah finds it nearly impossible to accept that the Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is benevolent; throughout the film, she remains hostile towards it and what it represents, while her own son develops a bond with it resembling a father-son relationship. In the director's cut of the movie, it is revealed that Sarah has an opportunity to destroy the machine's processor, thus killing it. She nearly does so, but John puts a stop to her.
In a moment of desperation, Sarah attempts to murder Miles Dyson, the researcher who is destined to build the neural network that eventually becomes Skynet. In doing this, she loses touch with her humanity, becoming eerily similar to the Terminator itself. Ultimately, John and the Terminator stop Sarah, and together persuade Dyson to stop his research and destroy all recovered remnants of the first Terminator. The Terminator then, with the help of Sarah Connor, destroys himself, despite the protests of the young John.
In the first Terminator movie, it is mentioned that Sarah was a legend among members of the resistance, teaching her son to fight and organize while they were still in hiding prior to the war. The epilogue to Terminator 2 shows her living to become a grandmother.
However, at the time of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines she is already dead, succumbing to leukemia sometime after Terminator 2. Her ashes were spread at sea while a casket containing a cache of weapons was placed for John to find. The engraving on her "gravesite" reads: No fate but what you make.
In November 2005, it was announced that 20th Century Fox would produce a television series called The Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring the adventures of the title character and her son in the years between T2 and T3.