Fisher looks back on affair with ‘her Achilles heart’ Ford
Most of us have a romantic relationship (or something like it) we look back upon fondly, and questioningly, years later. Carrie Fisher just happened to have hers 40 years ago while making arguably the biggest movie of all time. In her funny and frequently touching new memoirs, The Princess Diarist (Blue Rider Press, 272 pp., out of four), the iconic Star Wars actress and author ( Postcards From the Edge) reveals the diaries she kept as a 19year-old starring in the blockbuster sci-fi film. She writes at length about her three-month affair with co-star Harrison Ford, who was 15 years older. It’s an eye-opener for fans, but it also shows a gifted writer even at a young age. There was a lot going on between Princess Leia’s hair buns.
Fisher has never had a problem speaking her mind, and she’s extremely honest in discussing her love/hate dynamic with fan interactions, her place as a geek goddess and that slave bikini she had to wear in Return of the Jedi. From the start, she lays bare her mind-set as a teenage actress who had a small role in Warren Beatty’s 1975 comedy Shampoo before blasting off into a galaxy far, far away in May 1976 in London. That’s where she met and worked with Mark Hamill and Ford, a laconic, handsome dude who could “take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the glutenfree world, all without breaking a sweat.” When they began their affair, he was a married man with kids. So there seems to be some guilt, especially as Fisher considers the effect adultery had on her parents (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher). Those looking for a tell-all won’t find one here — Fisher, now 60, keeps it pretty PG-13, so there’s no discussion of, say, Han Solo’s light saber. What she does instead in her signature style (with tangents and asides aplenty) when recollecting the “Carri- son” era is come clean about her emotions. She was pretty much in love at the time, but Ford’s unreadable, quiet, guy’s-guy persona drove her a bit crazy.
Fisher called him “my Achilles heart” in her angsty, stream-of-consciousness journals. In one entry she writes, “I’m sorry it’s not Mark — it could’ve been. It should’ve been. It might’ve meant something.”
She unleashes bits of trivia, such as the time she tried (and failed) to lose 10 pounds at a Texas “fat farm” before the original
Star Wars began production. Fisher doesn’t mention her feelings filming Han and Leia’s signature kiss in The Empire
Strikes Back or how she felt working with Ford on Jedi, perhaps saving those nuggets for a future tome. The best stuff here, though, are the chapters in which Fisher talks about her and Ford’s friendship now, four decades after their “very long one-night stand,” as well as their and Hamill’s perspectives on fame, fans and this massive franchise.
She gives one of the best lines to Ford, recalling how flying home together from London he said, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.” It’s so true not only of Leia, but her diarist alter ego.