A life of fame, privilege, and chaos
Star Wars’ Princess Leia led a troubled life off screen, but still maintained creative spark
LOS ANGELES — “I was born famous,” Carrie Fisher said.
The daughter of two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1950s — actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher — she would lead a life of inescapable fame, and the privilege and chaos that came with it.
She became a celebrity in her own right, playing the heroic Princess Leia in the blockbuster 1977 film Star Wars and two sequels in the 1980s, in what was the role of a lifetime.
What proved more difficult was playing the role of Carrie Fisher.
By design or necessity, she was constantly reinventing herself, first as a versatile character actress and later as a best-selling writer and raconteur, telling confessional tales about her parents and her troubled life amid Tinseltown’s glamour and grit.
Seldom far from a spotlight or the paparazzi, Fisher returned to the headlines in November, when she revealed in interviews and in a newly published memoir that she had an affair with co-star Harrison Ford while filming Star Wars in the 1970s.
She was on a promotion tour for her new book, The Princess Diarist, when she suffered an apparent heart attack Friday on an airline flight from London to Los Angeles. She was rushed to the UCLA medical centre and put in intensive care. She died Tuesday at the hospital, her daughter Billie Lourd told People magazine. She was 60.
Already a celebrity from Star Wars, Fisher won a different kind of acclaim in her 30s, as she launched a second career as an acerbic, self-lacerating chronicler of Hollywood excess — or “what it’s like to live an all-too-exciting life for all too long.”
In her first book, the best-selling semi-autobiographical 1987 novel Postcards From the Edge, Fisher wrote of life inside drug-rehabilitation clinics, of bedroom couplings and uncouplings and especially about the doubts, fears and resentments of a daughter who always seemed to stand in the shadow of her glamorous mother.
The book’s opening line could stand in as a nutshell summary of Fisher’s problems — and humour: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.”
She later wrote the screenplay for Postcards, which became a 1990 box-office hit directed by Mike Nichols. Meryl Streep received an Oscar nomination for playing Suzanne Vale, an aspiring actress whose life lurched from emergency to emergency. (Fisher wasn’t interested in the role, she said, because “I already did that.”)
Shirley MacLaine portrayed Doris, the lead character’s vain, overbearing mother, but Fisher reserved her harshest words in her script for Suzanne, the stand-in for herself.
“I came from nowhere and made something out of my life,” Doris tells her daughter. “You came from somewhere and are making nothing out of yours.”
Despite the big-screen airing of family dysfunction, Fisher and Reynolds stayed on good terms.
The movie led Fisher to yet another career as one of Hollywood’s top script doctors. Over a period of more than 15 years, she sharpened the dialogue of dozens of films, from Sister Act (1992) and So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) to various Star Wars sequels.
She wrote three more novels, Surrender the Pink, The Best Awful There Is and Delusions of Grandma, before abandoning the pretence of fiction altogether in favour of unvarnished memoir, with Shockaholic (2011) and Wishful Drinking (2008).
She was, by her own admission, an enfant terrible who never learned how to grow up. She had bipolar disorder, for which she received electroshock therapy. She loved LSD, rummaged through bathroom medicine cabinets and became addicted to cocaine, Percodan and booze.
Her interviews were unscripted and unguarded, as she chainsmoked cigarettes, chugged Coca-Cola and made light of her emotional damage.
Among other romantic attachments, she had a seven-year relationship with singer-songwriter Paul Simon before they were married in 1983. After 11 months, they were divorced. She later had a relationship with agent Bryan Lourd, with whom she had a daughter in 1992. Lourd then left her for a man.
In the 1980s, she dated a U.S. senator whose name she did not divulge.
In 2005, Fisher — a staunch Democrat — woke up in bed alongside the dead body of a friend who was a gay Republican political operative named R. Gregory Stevens. The autopsy listed cocaine and oxycodone use as the cause of death.
Despite the relentless drama of her life, Fisher maintained a steady acting career, appearing in more than 40 films and dozens of TV productions. Her first movie role came in Shampoo (1975), in which she had a sultry seduction scene with Warren Beatty.
Fisher was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2007 for a one-time role as a mentally unbalanced TV writer on the sitcom 30 Rock.
Survivors include her mother; her daughter, Billie Lourd; and a brother, producer and director Todd Fisher.
Fisher and her mother soldiered on together like an old, squabbling vaudeville team. A documentary about their intertwined lives, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, is to appear on HBO in 2017.
At last, Fisher gets top billing.