Carrie Fisher, actress and prolific writer, died on Tuesday morning. She was 60. The Star Wars actress suffered a heart attack on a flight last Friday, and was subsequently hospitalised in Los Angeles. She was best known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars original trilogy.
A spokesperson for the family told the media that she died at 8:55 AM.
The child of Hollywood royalty (her parents were Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds), Fisher grew up as a bookworm. Fisher wrote in her memoir, that she was born her mother had been anaesthetized and had her father had fainted.
“So when I arrived,” Ms. Fisher wrote, “I was virtually unattended! And I have been trying to make up for that fact ever since.”
Fisher was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She also developed a dependence on mind-altering substances. Carrie was hospitalised many times for drug-related issues. In Postcards From The Edge (a fictional version of her life) she writes about the time she had her stomach pumped.
“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.’”
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From a young age, Carrie seemed destined for stardom. At 15, she appeared in Irene, a Broadway musical starring her mother Debbie Reynolds. At 19, she was cast in Shampoo. This laid the foundation for her acting career, which was cemented with blockbusters like the Star Wars series, followed by small yet powerful roles in When Harry Met Sally, Scream 3, The Blues Brothers, Woody Allen’s Hannah And The Sisters, and many others. She even played satirical versions of herself in the TV series Sex And The City and The Big Bang Theory.
Fisher will be best remembered as Princess Leia, the spunky heroine of George Lucas’ Star Wars series. Fisher played Leia as a damsel who was capable of dealing with her own distress. In a world of outlandish hair dos and metallic bikinis, Fisher’s Leia was the wry voice of reason.
In her memoir Wishful Drinking, she recalls:
George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, “You can’t wear a bra under that dress.”
So, I say, “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
A D V E R T I S E M E N TAnd he says, “Because. . . there’s no underwear in space.”
The actress had a predictably quirky request about her passing.
What happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn’t—so you get strangled by your own bra.
Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.
Fisher also mined her own life experiences for her books. In Postcards From The Edge, she wrote about her experiences as an actress in Hollywood and her relationship with her celebrity mother. The book was later adapted into a film directed by Mike Nichols. Meryl Streep played her in the film.
She also wrote Wishful Drinking, a caustic autobiography and a version of her one-woman show of the same name. She recently published The Princess Diarist and had been promoting the book when she suffered cardiac arrest.
Fisher’s experiences with writing made her an exceptionally good script doctor. She consulted on films like Last Action Hero, These Old Broads, and The Wedding Singer.
She is survived by her mother, daughter Billie Lourd, brother Todd, and half sisters Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher.