Look up AFI in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

AFI, the three letter acronym, may refer to:

• AFI (band), an American alternative rock band
  • AFI (album), an album by AFI released in 2004
• Air Force Instruction, documented instructions for members of the United States Air Force
• American Film Institute, an independent non-profit film organization
• American Football Israel, a nonprofit sports organization
• Amniotic fluid index, a measure of the amount of amniotic fluid of a fetus
• Aquarium Fish International, a monthly magazine
• Armed Forces Insurance, insurance company for American military professionals
• Australian Film Institute, an organisation that promotes Australian film and television
• Agencia Federal de Investigación or Federal Investigations Agency, a Mexican agency
• Nikon AF-I, designation for "AutoFocus Internal" Nikon AF lenses
• Application Family Identifier, code of an RFID tag

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Carrie Fisher
Fisher at WonderCon 2009
Born	Carrie Frances Fisher (1956-10-21) October 21, 1956 (age 55) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, novelist, screenwriter, performance artist
Years active	1975–present
Spouse	Paul Simon (1983–1984)
Partner	Bryan Lourd (1991–1994)
Children	1
Parents	Eddie Fisher Debbie Reynolds

Carrie Frances Fisher (born October 21, 1956) is an American actress, novelist, screenwriter, and performance artist. She is best known for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, her bestselling novel Postcards from the Edge and screenplay for a film of the same name, and her autobiographical one-woman play, Wishful Drinking.

Early life[link]

Fisher was born in Beverly Hills, California, the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Russia, and her mother was Protestant.^[1][2][3] Her younger brother is producer and actor Todd Fisher, and her half-sisters are actresses Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher. Joely and Tricia's mother is the singer/actress Connie Stevens.

When Carrie Fisher was two, her parents divorced after her father left Debbie for her best friend, actress Elizabeth Taylor, the widow of Eddie's best friend Mike Todd. The following year, her mother married shoe store chain owner Harry Karl, who secretly spent her life savings. It was assumed from an early age that Carrie would go into the family show business, and she began appearing with her mother in Las Vegas, Nevada at the age of 12. She attended Beverly Hills High School, but she left to join her mother on the road. She appeared as a debutante and singer in the hit Broadway revival Irene (1973), starring her mother.

Career[link]

1970s[link]

Fisher with Wim Wenders in 1978

In 1973, Fisher enrolled at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, which she attended for 18 months. She made her film debut in the Columbia comedy Shampoo (1975) starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn, with Lee Grant and Jack Warden. In 1977, Fisher starred as Princess Leia in George Lucas' science fiction film Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) opposite Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, a part she sarcastically claims to have obtained by sleeping "with some nerd."^[4] At the time she thought the script for Star Wars was fantastic but didn't expect that many people would agree with her and although her fellow actors weren't close they bonded after the commercial success of the film.^[5] The huge success of Star Wars made her internationally famous and the character of Princess Leia became a merchandising triumph; there were small plastic action figures of the Princess in toy stores across the United States. She appeared as Princess Leia in the 1978 made-for-TV film, The Star Wars Holiday Special.

In May 1978, she appeared alongside John Ritter in the ABC-TV film Leave Yesterday Behind as a horse trainer who helps Ritter's character after an accident leaves him a paraplegic. At this time, Fisher appeared with Laurence Olivier and Joanne Woodward in the anthology series Laurence Olivier Presents in a television version of the William Inge play Come Back, Little Sheba.

In November 1978, Fisher was the guest host for Saturday Night Live with musical guests The Blues Brothers and special guest Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci. Dressed in a gold bikini, she reprised her Princess Leia character from Star Wars in "Beach Blanket Bimbo from Outer Space", a parody sketch of 1960s beach party films. Bill Murray and Gilda Radner imitated the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello characters. John Belushi played biker Eric Von Zipper, and Dan Aykroyd, with whom Fisher was romantically involved, portrayed Vincent Price.

Fisher appeared in the music video for Ringo Starr's cover of "You're Sixteen" as the love interest in 1978 on his TV special of that year.^[6][7]

1980s[link]

Fisher later appeared in The Blues Brothers film as Joliet Jake's vengeful ex-lover, listed in the credits as "Mystery Woman". She appeared on Broadway in Censored Scenes from King Kong in 1980. That year, she appeared again as Princess Leia in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. She made her third and final appearance as Leia in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, for which she became a sex symbol due to her appearance wearing a golden metal bikini (the slave girl outfit which almost immediately rose to pop culture icon status). She is one of the few actors or actresses to star in films with both John and James Belushi, later appearing with the latter in the film The Man with One Red Shoe. She also was a replacement in the Broadway production of Agnes of God (1982). She appeared in the Woody Allen film Hannah and her Sisters in 1986.

In 1987, Fisher published her first novel, Postcards from the Edge. The book was semi-autobiographical in the sense that she fictionalized and satirized real life events such as her drug addiction of the late 1970s.^[8] It became a bestseller, and she received the Los Angeles Pen Award for Best First Novel. Also during 1987, she was in the Australian film The Time Guardian. In 1989, Fisher played a major supporting role in When Harry Met Sally, and in the same year, she appeared opposite Tom Hanks as his wife in The 'Burbs.

1990s[link]

In 1990, Columbia Pictures released a film version of Postcards from the Edge, adapted for the screen by Fisher and starring Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Quaid. Fisher appeared in the fantasy comedy film Drop Dead Fred in 1991, and played a therapist in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). During the 1990s, Fisher also published the novels Surrender the Pink (1991) and Delusions of Grandma (1993).

2000s[link]

Fisher at Star Wars Celebration IV, 2007

In the film Scream 3 (2000), Fisher played an actress mistaken for Carrie Fisher. Director's commentary on the Scream 3 DVD suggests that the sequence was in fact penned by Fisher herself.

In 2001, Fisher played a nun in the Kevin Smith comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The title spoofs The Empire Strikes Back and the film, which includes Mark Hamill, satirizes many Hollywood movies, including the Star Wars series.

She also co-wrote the TV comedy film These Old Broads (2001), of which she was also co-executive producer. It starred her mother, Debbie Reynolds, as well as Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins and Shirley MacLaine. In this, Taylor's character, an agent, explains to Reynolds' character, an actress, that she was in an alcoholic blackout when she married the actress's husband, "Freddy".

Besides acting and writing original works, Fisher was one of the top script doctors in Hollywood, working on the screenplays of other writers.^[9][10] She has done uncredited polishes on movies starting with The Wedding Singer and Sister Act,^[9] and was hired by the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, to polish scripts for his 1992 TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.^[9] Her expertise in this area was why she was chosen as one of the interviewers for the screenwriting documentary Dreams on Spec in 2007. However, during an interview in 2004 she said that she no longer does much script doctoring.^[10]

Fisher also voices Peter Griffin's boss Angela on the animated sitcom Family Guy and appeared in a book of photographs titled Hollywood Moms (2001) for which she wrote the introduction. Fisher published a sequel to Postcards, The Best Awful There Is in 2004. In August 2006, Fisher appeared prominently in the audience of the Comedy Central's Roast of William Shatner.

Fisher wrote and performed in her one-woman play Wishful Drinking at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles from November 7, 2006, to January 14, 2007.^[11] Her show played at the Berkeley Repertory Theater through April 2008,^[12] followed by performances in San Jose, California in July 2008, Hartford Stage in August 2008^[13] before moving on to the Arena Stage in Washington, DC in September 2008^[14] and Boston^[15] in October 2008. Fisher published her autobiographical book, called Wishful Drinking based on her successful play in December 2008 and embarked on a media tour. On April 2, 2009, Fisher returned to the stage with her play at the Seattle Repertory Theatre with performances through May 9, 2009.^[16] On October 4, 2009, Wishful Drinking then opened on Broadway in New York at Studio 54 and played an extended run until January 17, 2010.^[17][18] In December 2009, Fisher's bestselling memoir Wishful Drinking earned her a nomination for a 2009 Grammy Award in the Best Spoken Word Album category.^[19]

In 2007, she was a full-time judge on FOX's filmmaking-competition reality television series On the Lot.

Fisher joined Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne on Saturday evenings for The Essentials with informative and entertaining conversation on Hollywood's best films. She guest-starred in the episode titled "Sex and Another City" from season 3 of Sex and the City with Sarah Jessica Parker. This episode also featured Vince Vaughn, Hugh Hefner and Sam Seder in guest roles. On October 25, 2007, Fisher guest-starred as Rosemary Howard on the second season episode of 30 Rock called "Rosemary's Baby", for which she received an Emmy Award^[20] nomination. Her last line in the show was a spoof from Star Wars: "Help me Liz Lemon, You're my only hope!". On April 28, 2008, she was a guest on Deal or No Deal. In 2008, she also had a cameo as a doctor in the Star Wars related comedy Fanboys.

Fisher's Wishful Drinking aired as a feature-length documentary on HBO.^[21]

Fisher appeared on the seventh season of Entourage in the summer of 2010.^[21]

Personal life[link]

Fisher was briefly engaged to the actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd, who proposed on the set of their film The Blues Brothers in 1980. She has stated: "We had rings, we got blood tests, the whole shot. But then I got back together with Paul Simon."^[22]

Fisher dated musician Paul Simon from 1977 until 1983, then was married to him from August 1983 to July 1984, and they dated again for a time after their divorce. During their marriage, she appeared in Simon's music video for the song "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War".

Subsequently, she had a relationship with Creative Artists Agency principal and casting agent Bryan Lourd. They had one child together, Billie Catherine Lourd (born July 17, 1992). The couple's relationship ended when Lourd left to be in a homosexual relationship. Though Fisher has described Lourd as her second husband in interviews, according to a 2004 profile of the actress and writer, she and Lourd were never legally married.^[23]

Fisher also had a close relationship with James Blunt. While working on his album Back to Bedlam in 2003, Blunt spent much of his time at Fisher's residence. Vanity Fair's George Wayne wanted Fisher to explain if their relationship was sexual. Fisher dismissed the suggestion: "Absolutely not, but I did become his therapist. He was a soldier. This boy has seen awful stuff. Every time James hears fireworks or anything like that, his heart beats faster, and he gets 'fight or flight'. You know, he comes from a long line of soldiers dating back to the 10th century. He would tell me these horrible stories. He was a captain, a reconnaissance soldier. I became James’s therapist. So it would have been unethical to sleep with my patient."^[24]

On February 26, 2005, R. Gregory "Greg" Stevens, a lobbyist and advisor for the Republican Party, was found dead in Fisher's California home due to an overdose of OxyContin compounded by obstructive sleep apnea.^[25] In an interview, Fisher claimed that Stevens' ghost haunted her mansion. Fisher was unsettled by this: "I was a nut for a year," she explained, "and in that year I took drugs again."^[26]

Fisher has described herself as an "enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God."^[27] She was raised Protestant,^[1] but often attends Jewish services, the faith of her father, with Orthodox friends.^[28] She was a spokesperson for Jenny Craig, Inc. Television ads airing in late January 2011.^[29]

Bipolar disorder and drug problems[link]

Fisher has publicly discussed her problems with drugs, her struggle with bipolar disorder, and her overcoming an addiction to prescription medication, most notably on ABC's 20/20 and The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive with Stephen Fry for the BBC. She discussed her 2008 memoir Wishful Drinking and various topics in it with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today on December 10, 2008 and also revealed that she wishes she had turned down the role of Princess Leia.^[30] This interview was followed by a similar appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on December 12, 2008, where she discussed her electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments.^[31] She has said that she receives ECT every six weeks to "blow apart the cement" in her brain.^[32]

While in Sydney, Australia, Fisher revealed in another interview that she had a cocaine addiction during filming of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and also survived an overdose. "Slowly, I realized I was doing a bit more drugs than other people and losing my choice in the matter" she said in an interview.^[33][34]

Filmography[link]

Bibliography[link]

Novels

• Postcards from the Edge, 1987, ISBN 0-7434-6651-9
• Surrender the Pink, 1990, ISBN 0-671-66640-1
• Delusions of Grandma, 1993, ISBN 0-684-85803-7
• Hollywood Moms, 2001, (introduction)
• The Best Awful There Is, 2004, ISBN 0-7434-7857-6

Non-fiction

• Wishful Drinking, 2008, ISBN 1-4391-0225-2
• Shockaholic, 2011, ISBN 978-0-7432-6482-2

Screenplays

• Postcards from the Edge, 1990
• These Old Broads, 2001
• E-Girl (2007)
• doctored screenplays for Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992) and The Wedding Singer (1998)^[36]

Plays

• Wishful Drinking, 2006
• Wishful Drinking,^[37] 2008
• A Spy in the House of Me, 2008

References[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Carrie Fisher

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Carrie Fisher

• Official website
• Carrie Fisher at the Internet Movie Database
• Carrie Fisher at the Internet Broadway Database
• Carrie Fisher at the TCM Movie Database
• Carrie Fisher at AllRovi
• Working the Edge, a 1990 Entertainment Weekly cover story profiling Fisher
• Works by or about Carrie Fisher in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

George Lucas
George Lucas in 2009
Born	George Walton Lucas, Jr. (1944-05-14) May 14, 1944 (age 68) Modesto, California, U.S.
Residence	Marin County, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Modesto Junior College
Alma mater	University of Southern California (B.A. and B.S.)[1]
Occupation	Chairman & CEO of Lucasfilm
Years active	1965–present
Influenced by	Frank Herbert,[2] Joseph Campbell, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford
Home town	Central Valley, California, U.S.
Net worth	US$3.2 billion (2011)[1]
Spouse	Marcia Lucas (1969–1983)
Partner	Mellody Hobson (2007–present)

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm.^[3] He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.^[1]

Early life and education[link]

George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.^[4][5]

Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.

As a child, Lucas never learned to swim, which became a source of embarrassment and frustration as he became older. Lucas has expressed in several interviews that his inability to swim was "the passion that drove me to succeed in filmmaking... [It] gave me the chip on my shoulder that I think was critical to my later success"^[6]

During this time, an experimental filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses. These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.

"That's when he [George] really started exploring" Plummer recalled. "We went to a theater on Union Street that shows art films, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been an uninterested slacker in high school. At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry — famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," Wexler recalls.^[7]

Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood and John Milius, they became a clique of film students known as The Dirty Dozen. He also became very good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker and future Indiana Jones collaborator, Steven Spielberg. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich, a film theoretician comparable in historical importance to Sergei Eisenstein, who moved to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM, RKO, and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.

Lucas saw many inspiring films in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, the French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinéma vérité 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cinéma vérité with such titles as Look at Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, Filmmaker, and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema.^[7]

After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but he was immediately turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempted from service after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather.

In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967–68 National Student Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a student scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe and work on the making of a film of his choosing. The film he chose was Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had "made it" in Hollywood. In 1969, George Lucas was one of the camera operators on the classic Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.

Film career[link]

George Lucas is a filmmaker, with a film career dominated by writing and production. Aside from the nine short films he made in the 1960s, he also directed six major features. His work from 1971 and 1977 as a writer-director, which established him as a major figure in Hollywood, consists of just three films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. There was a 22-year hiatus between the original Star Wars film and his only other feature-film directing credits, the three Star Wars prequels.

Lucas acted as a writer and executive producer on another successful Hollywood film franchise, the Indiana Jones series. In addition, he established his own effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to make the original Star Wars film. The company is now one of the most successful in the industry.