‘SHE’S NOW WITH CARRIE’
Reynolds dies one day after Fisher
Actress Debbie Reynolds, the star of the 1952 classic Singin’ in the Rain, has died. She was 84.
Her son, Todd Fisher, said Reynolds died Wednesday, a day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher, who was 60.
“She’s now with Carrie and we’re all heartbroken,” Fisher said from Cedars-Sinai Med- ical Center, where his mother was taken by ambulance earlier Wednesday.
He said the stress of his sister’s death “was too much” for Reynolds. “She said, ‘I want to be with Carrie,’ ” her son said. “And then she was gone.”
Reynolds enjoyed the heights of show business success and endured the depths of personal tragedy and betrayal. She lost one husband to Elizabeth Taylor and two other husbands plundered her for millions.
Carrie Fisher, who found lasting fame as Princess Leia in Star Wars and struggled for much of her life with drug addiction and mental health problems, died Tuesday after falling ill on a plane and being hospitalized.
In her screen career, Reynolds was a superstar early in life. After two minor roles at Warner Bros. and three supporting roles at MGM, studio boss Louis B. Mayer cast her in Singin’ in the Rain, despite Gene Kelly’s objections. She was 19 with little dance experience, and she would be appearing with two of the screen’s greatest dancers, Donald O’Connor and Kelly, who also codirected.
“Gene Kelly was hard on me, but I think he had to be,” Reynolds said in a 1999 Associated Press interview. “I had to learn everything in three to six months. Donald O’Connor had been dancing since he was three months old, Gene Kelly since he was two years old . ... I think Gene knew I had to be challenged.”
The Unsinkable Molly Brown starred Reynolds and was based on the life of a Colorado woman who rose from poverty to riches and triumphed over tragedy, including the sinking of the Titanic.
The 1964 Meredith Willson musical, with Molly’s defiant song I Ain’t Down Yet, brought Reynolds her only Academy Award nomination.
In her later years, Reynolds appeared regularly on television — as John Goodman’s mother on Roseanne and a mom on Will & Grace.
In 1996 she won critical acclaim in the title role of Albert Brooks’ movie Mother, in which Brooks played a struggling writer who moves back home and works on his strained relationship with Reynolds’ character.
“Debbie Reynolds, a legend and my movie mom. I can’t believe this happened one day after Carrie,” Brooks said on Twitter.