On December 23rd, Carrie Fisher boarded an aeroplane from London to Los Angeles and suffered from a heart attack. She had just completed the European tour of her book. Four days later, she passed away at the age of 60.
Fisher was raised into the Hollywood industry. Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, was the star of screen having found fame at the age of 19 in Singin’ in the Rain and her father was pop star Eddie Fisher. She was born on October 21st 1956, just a few years after Reynolds became a star. The two would develop a close bond, captured brilliantly in a photo where Fisher, just six years old, watches her mother perform on stage.
As a child Fisher was known as the “family bookworm”, but an opportunity to star on stage alongside her mother in Irene meant that she never graduated. She moved to London where she enrolled in Central School of Speech and Drama, which was followed 18-months later by a move back to New York, studying at the Sarah Lawrence arts college. She also never graduated from there. Her first film credit was 1975’s Shampoo with Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty, but it was a “goofy little” science fiction movie called Star Wars that gave Fisher her big break.
It was a movie that no one in Hollywood gave a chance to. Every studio turned down writer/director George Lucas’s space opera about a young farm boy who joins a rebellion to take down a galactic empire, but it was finally picked up by 20th Century Fox in 1973. “When I got the part of a princess in this goofy little science-fiction film, I thought: it’ll be fun to do,” she told the Daily Mail in 2011. “I’m 19! Who doesn’t want to have fun at 19? I’ll go hang out with a bunch of robots for a few months and then return to my life and try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. But then Star Wars, this goofy, little three-month hang-out with robots did something unexpected. It exploded across the firmament of pop culture, taking all of us along with it.”
Fisher would later say that she didn’t remember much about the filming of Star Wars because she didn’t think she would need to, but did admit to an affair with co-star Harrison Ford who was married to Mary Marquardt at the time. “I don’t remember much about things like the order we shot scenes in, or who I got to know well first,” she wrote in her 2016 memoirs The Princess Diarist. “Nor did anyone mention that one day I would be called upon to remember any of this long-ago experience.”
Released in 1977, Star Wars earned $220 million worldwide in its initial theatrical run (around $869 million in 2016 money) and catapulted Fisher, Ford and Mark Hamill – or at least Princess Leia, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker – to household names. Star Wars overtook Jaws as the biggest film of all-time, and it would forever change the blockbuster industry, giving rise to the term ‘toyetic’ due to its clever action figure marketing. Fisher would reprise the role for Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi in 1983, in which she wore the now infamous gold bikini.
In an 1983 issue of Rolling Stone, Fisher wore the costume and said it was an important part of her character in the movie, but always for the right reasons. “The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry,” she said. “In Return of the Jedi, she gets to be more feminine, more supportive, more affectionate. But let’s not forget that these movies are basically boys’ fantasies. So the other way they made her more female in this one was to have her take off her clothes.” She would later say that she hated the costume as it was uncomfortable to wear. “This was no bikini. It was metal. It didn’t go where you went,” Fisher recalled in The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. “After the shots, the prop man would have to check me. He’d say, ‘Okay tits are fine. Let’s go.’ So I started checking for any bounce or slip after takes. Then it was, ‘Cut. Hey, how they doin’, hooters in place? Tits all right?’ I was embarrassed at first with a hundred guys going crazy over my revealed self. Dignity was out of the question.” Although the costume has become iconic, with the look adorned by thousands of cosplayers every year as well as parodied and celebrated in film and TV, it has caused some ire in the eyes of Star Wars fans who found it offensive and misogynistic. In 2015 a Black Series figure of “Slave Leia” (re-dubbed Hutt Slayer Leia by fans) caused outrage from a parent who didn’t want their children seeing the figure. Fisher responded: “The father who flipped out about it, ‘What am I going to tell my kid about why she’s in that outfit?’ Tell them that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage.”
“I got to tell her [about having pictures of her on my wall] when Carrie Fisher and [Jason Mewes] were in a station wagon on the set of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” writer and director Kevin Smith wrote on Instagram. “She was gracious about hearing it for the zillionth time from the zillionth man or woman who grew up idolizing her, but wickedly added ‘I’m glad to know I helped you find your light saber.’ And with that, she stopped being Carrie Fisher to me and just became Carrie.”
Fisher had other film roles in The Blues Brothers [where she became engaged to co-star Dan Aykroyd], The ‘Burbs and When Harry Met Sally, but nothing would reach the levels of popularity that the Star Wars trilogy had.
While she continued acting Fisher also turned her hand to being a script doctor, a usually unwanted job in Hollywood as you never receive credit. She had already given Lucas handwritten notes on his script for Star Wars: Episode VI -Return of the Jedi (not The Empire Strikes Back, as some sites have claimed) to improve her dialogue, and it soon became her calling card. Lucas, impressed by her re-writes on Return of the Jedi, asked her to write an episode of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Steven Spielberg requested she to ‘punch up’ Tinkerbell’s dialogue in Hook. “Working with Spielberg [on Hook] was my first job in that area,” she told The AV Club. “It’s just nice being treated with a different kind of respect than certainly you would be as an actor.” Disney brought her on to re-work Whoopi Goldberg’s dialogue for Sister Act, which upset the leading star greatly. It was a battle that the industry took great interest in watching, as Hollywood’s leading black actor took on the most white-bread company. Fisher wasn’t just brought on to write, she was a peace-keeper between Goldberg and Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg who were at war over the film. “You’re having a pissing contest with a guy who actually has a dick,” Fisher told Goldberg, according to a 1992 Entertainment Weekly article. “I don’t particularly advise people to take my advice, but I would avoid [fighting him]. Send Jeffrey a hatchet and say, ‘Please bury this on both our behalfs.'”
The success of Sister Act saw Fisher also work on Goldberg’s Made in America as well as Rene Russo’s characters in both Lethal Weapon 3 and Outbreak. By this point, Fisher was being paid upwards of $100,000 a week to be a script doctor. “A script would be questionable and the trembling executive would give it to a famous writer with a million bucks, so he could say, ‘Yeah, it’s fortified now. We’ve given it vitamins. Wait, wait, wait… It needs the woman’s touch. Give it to Carrie Fisher,’ Lethal Weapon director Shane Black told Empire. “It just made people breathe easier, throwing money at this enormous behemoth. Even if the movie sucked, now they could say, ‘It’s not our fault.'” She was brought in to re-write Drew Barrymore’s dialogue in The Wedding Singer and a complete re-work of So I Married an Axe Murderer when Chevy Chase was set to star. Fisher said in interviews that she also worked on a lot of bad movies, including Milk Money, My Girl 2 and Love Affair. In 2000, she wrote herself a cameo in Wes Craven’s Scream 3 as an actor mistaken for Carrie Fisher. “I was up for the part of Princess Leia,” her character jokes in the movie. “But who gets it? The girl who slept with George Lucas.”
Her script doctoring drew to a close in the 2000s, although she admitted to returning to the Star Wars universe to re-write some of the dialogue in Lucas’s much-maligned Prequel Trilogy. “It was a long, very lucrative episode of my life,” she told Newsweek in 2008. “But it’s complicated to do that. Now it’s all changed, actually. Now in order to get a rewrite job, you have to submit your notes for your ideas on how to fix the script. So they can get all the notes from all the different writers, keep the notes and not hire you. That’s free work and that’s what I always call life-wasting events.”
While Fisher was best known for Star Wars and least known for her script doctoring, her personal life seemed to overshadow her work. Through shows like 20/20 and The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, Fisher publicly discussed that she was bi-polar and would often take drugs to “feel normal.” In an 2008 appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Fisher admitted to receiving electroconvulsive therapy treatments every six weeks to “blow apart the cement” in her brain. Her addiction to cocaine began on the set of The Empire Strikes Back. “Slowly, I realized I was doing a bit more drugs than other people and losing my choice in the matter,” she noted in an interview with The Daily Mail in 2010, adding that her Blues Brothers co-star John Belushi – who died of a drug overdose – warned her about her addiction. Her personal demons were a toll on her mother and father, and Fisher admitted that if she had known the fame she would have received from Star Wars she would have turned down the role. In 1985 she overdosed on a combination of prescription medication and sleeping pills.
“When you were in her good graces, you couldn’t have more fun with any person on the planet,” Mark Hamill told The Hollywood Reporter. “She was able to make you feel like you were the most important thing in her life. I think that’s a really rare quality. And then you could go 180 degrees opposite, where you were furious with one another and wouldn’t speak for weeks and weeks. But that’s all part of what makes a relationship complete. It’s not all one sided. Like I say, she was a handful. She was high maintenance. But my life would have been so much drabber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was.”
Fisher’s outspoken nature of her illnesses led to her becoming a spokesperson for better understanding of bipolar disorder and other mental ailments. In 2016, Harvard College awarded her their 10th Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. “Renowned throughout a literary career spanning decades for her bravely honest and deeply funny style, Ms. Fisher’s work humanizes a popular culture obsessed with celebrity, and helps readers laugh at the absurdity of contemporary society and relationships,” their website wrote in a statement. “Her forthright activism and outspokenness about addiction, mental illness and agnosticism have advanced public discourse on these issues with creativity and empathy.”
In 2012, Disney purchased Lucasfilm and announced a brand new Star Wars trilogy that would be set after the events of Return of the Jedi. Like Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher returned to the franchise that made her a star. She reprised her role of Leia Organa in J.J. Abrams’ 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and it was revealed recently that she had completed work on Rian Johnson’s yet-to-be-titled Star Wars: Episode VIII.
On December 23rd 2016, Fisher suffered a heart attack and she died on December 27th. “She was our princess, damn it, and the actress who played her blurred into one gorgeous, fiercely independent and ferociously funny, take-charge woman who took our collective breath away,” Hamill posted on Twitter. “I am grateful for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness and even the bratty, self-indulgent crap my beloved space-twin gave me though the years.” Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies, added: “Carrie was the brightest light in every room she entered” while Billy Dee Willams tweeted: “She was a dear friend, whom I greatly respected and admired.” Anthony Daniels, Warwick Davis and her The Force Awakens co-stars John Boyega, Andy Serkis, Gwendoline Christie Lupita N’yongo also gave their tributes. J.J. Abrams wrote, “You didn’t need to meet Carrie Fisher to understand her power. She was just as brilliant and beautiful, tough and wonderful, incisive and funny as you could imagine. What an unlucky thing to lose her. How lucky to have been blessed with her at all.”
Just one day later, Fisher’s mother Debbie Reynolds also passed away.
Fisher’s daughter, Billy Lourd, said on Instagram: “Receiving all of your prayers and kind words over the past week has given me strength during a time I thought strength could not exist. There are no words to express how much I will miss my Abadaba and my one and only Momby. Your love and support means the world to me.”
“There’s a part of me that gets surprised when people think I am brave to talk about what I’ve gone through,” Fisher once said. “I was brave to last through it.”
Rest in peace Carrie Fisher, and may the Force be with you. Always.
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