It’s full of holes, but this portrait of tortured Carrie Fisher is fascinating
Carrie Fisher never stood a chance, and one photo proves it. She’s 14, duetting in a ludicrous ball gown with her mother, movie star Debbie reynolds, at the Desert inn Hotel, Las Vegas, while her little brother plays guitar.
For both children, it was their first time on any stage in front of an audience. What a debut.
No wonder her life spiralled into a maelstrom of drug abuse, alcoholism, broken marriages, breakdowns, rehab and early death. Vegas was her death sentence.
The miracle is that her brother Todd, now 66, lived to tell the story. He was the only contributor to Carrie Fisher: A Life In Ten Pictures (BBC2) who could claim to know the Star Wars actress well throughout her life.
Though some of the other talking heads threw interesting sidelights on her complex personality, they were incidental characters in her life — her hairdresser, a friend from her teen years, an old chum of her mother and a few more.
each brought a picture that purported to crystallise an era in Carrie’s tumultuous career, from Hollywood brat to Princess Leia (just 19 when she first filmed that role), author to Broadway star in a confessional production called Wishful Drinking.
But the absence of any major co- stars or lovers meant large parts of her story went untold. We saw a picture of her with Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill promoting Star Wars in 1977, but nothing about the pose hinted at the sexual relationship between Ford and Fisher — and Harrison made no comment, not even in archive news footage or a chat show clip.
at least that affair was acknowledged. The programme failed to mention that at 26, Carrie was married to rock star Paul Simon. Perhaps the director felt she shouldn’t be defined by the men she wed, but any documentary on Simon would be remiss if it didn’t cover his marriage to her.
and surely it’s relevant that she was the inspiration for a song as beautiful as Hearts and Bones. ‘if you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you,’ Fisher once quipped, ‘do it!’
Paul Slansky, who coaxed her into writing her novel Postcards From The edge (a lightly fictionalised memoir of drug abuse and disintegration), produced a cassette of her ad-libbing dialogue for the book. She was explosively, hilariously creative, though the intensity in her voice betrayed her constant state of anxiety.
We were told she self-medicated with drugs and booze to quell her demons. How much of her mental illness was triggered by teenage binges and excesses was not clear — her friend Jane Booke, remembering a hedonistic 17th-birthday party at el Morocco club in New York, merely said they had ‘a really good time’.
Carrie Fisher died in 2016 after a heart attack on a transatlantic flight. Her mother, Debbie, died the next day — another detail this account omitted. Fascinating though it was, it left out so much.