This was published 7 years ago
Carrie Fisher, became Hollywood royalty after Star Wars role
Carrie Fisher, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movie franchise has died aged 60.
A family spokesman, Simon Halls, said she had a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday and had been hospitalised in Los Angeles.
Carrie Fisher did not take fame too seriously, or consider it an enduring commodity.Credit: Ben Rushton
After her Star Wars success, Fisher, the daughter of the pop singer Eddie Fisher and the actress Debbie Reynolds, went on to use her perch among Hollywood royalty to offer wry commentary in her books on the paradoxes and absurdities of the entertainment industry.
Star Wars, released in 1977, turned her overnight into an international movie star. The film, written and directed by George Lucas, travelled around the world, breaking box-office records. It proved to be the first instalment of a blockbuster series whose vivid, even preposterous characters – living "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", as the opening sequence announced – became pop culture legends and the progenitors of a merchandising bonanza.
Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford share a tender moment in The Force Awakens.Credit: Lucasfilm
Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo.
Wielding blaster pistols, piloting futuristic vehicles and, to her occasional chagrin, wearing strange hairdos and a revealing metal bikini, she reprised the role in three more films – The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Return of the Jedi in 1983 and, 32 years later, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general.
Lucasfilm said on Tuesday that Fisher had completed her work in an as-yet-untitled eighth episode of the main Star Wars saga, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017.
Winning the admiration of countless fans, Fisher never played Leia as helpless. She had the toughness to escape the clutches of the monstrous gangster Jabba the Hutt and the tenderness to tell Han Solo, as he is about to be frozen in carbonite, "I love you". (Solo, played by Harrison Ford, caddishly replies, "I know".)
Carrie Fisher brought her one-woman show Wishful Drinking to Australia in 2010.Credit: Fairfax Media
Offscreen, Fisher was open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She gave her duelling dispositions the nicknames Roy ("the wild ride of a mood," she said) and Pam ("who stands on the shore and sobs"). She channelled her struggles with depression and substance abuse into fiercely comic works, including the semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From the Edge and the one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which she turned into a memoir.
For all the attention she received for playing Princess Leia, Fisher enjoyed poking wicked fun at the character, as well as at the fantastical Star Wars universe. "Who wears that much lip gloss into battle?" she asked in a recent memoir, The Princess Diarist.
Having seen fame's light and dark sides, Fisher did not take it too seriously, or consider it an enduring commodity.
As she wrote in The Princess Diarist: "Perpetual celebrity – the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture – is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali."
Carrie Frances Fisher was born on October 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, California. She was the first child of her highly visible parents (they later had a son, Todd), and said in Wishful Drinking that, while her mother was under anaesthetic delivering her, her father fainted.
"So when I arrived," Fisher wrote, "I was virtually unattended! And I have been trying to make up for that fact ever since."
In 1959, Reynolds divorced Eddie Fisher in the wake of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married that same year. (Taylor later left him to marry Richard Burton.)
Any semblance of a normal childhood was impossible for Carrie Fisher. At 15, she played a debutante in the Broadway musical Irene, which starred her mother, and appeared in Reynolds' Las Vegas nightclub act. At 17, Fisher made her first movie Shampoo (1975), Hal Ashby's satire of Nixon-era politics and the libidinous Los Angeles culture of the time, in which she played the precocious daughter of a wealthy woman (Lee Grant) having an affair with a promiscuous hairdresser (Warren Beatty).
She was one of roughly two dozen young actresses considered for the role of Leia in Lucas' marathon casting sessions for Star Wars. (Cindy Williams, Amy Irving, Sissy Spacek and Jodie Foster were among those who also read for the part.)
Star Wars became a financial and cultural phenomenon, launching more movies and a merchandising machine that splashed Fisher's likeness on all manner of action figures and products while casting her into an uneasy limelight.
She partied with the Rolling Stones during the making of The Empire Strikes Back, hosted Saturday Night Live and had romantic relationships with Dan Aykroyd (with whom she appeared in The Blues Brothers) and Paul Simon. She and Simon had a marriage that lasted less than a year, and he was inspired to write his song Hearts and Bones about their time together.
In The Princess Diarist, she admitted what many fans had long suspected: During the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had an affair.
Fisher acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970s and '80s and later said that she was using cocaine while making The Empire Strikes Back.
In 1985, after filming a role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, she had a nearly fatal drug overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program in Los Angeles. Those experiences later became grist for her caustic, comic novel Postcards From the Edge, whose chapters are variously presented as letters, diary entries, monologues and third-person narratives.
As the main character, Suzanne, writes of her rehab stay: "Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, 'Instant gratification takes too long'."
The book was later made into a movie, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Fisher. Released in 1990, it starred Meryl Streep as Suzanne and Shirley MacLaine as her movie-star mother.
On film, Fisher also played the scene-stealing best friend of Meg Ryan's title character in the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally… On television, she played satirical versions of herself on shows such as Sex and the City and The Big Bang Theory. She had a recurring role on the British comedy Catastrophe as the mother of the character played by Rob Delaney, one of the show's creators.
Her survivors include her mother; her brother, Todd; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with the talent agent Bryan Lourd; and her half sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.
New York Times