Fisher’s life beyond ‘Star Wars’
MORE THAN LEIA: She brought her dry wit and take-no-prisoners attitude to the films and to books on her struggles with drugs, alcohol and mental illness
CARRIE Fisher was known worldwide for her portrayal of Princess Leia, the heroine and rebel leader at the heart of four Star Wars films, but she was quick to point out that she was much more than her creatively coifed character.
She was known for a dry wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude, qualities she brought to the role of Leia and to a series of keenly observed books that skewered celebrity and brought gallows humour to her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness.
Born into a prominent Hollywood family, Fisher was the sharptongued creative force behind books, screenplays, a one-woman show and, in recent years, a wry social media presence trotting the globe with her dog, Gary, in tow.
Here are some highlights of Fisher’s life outside Star Wars.
A CHILD OF HOLLYWOOD
Fisher lived her entire life in the spotlight. She was the daughter of movie star Debbie Reynolds and pop singer Eddie Fisher, but their glamorous world came crashing down when her father had an affair with a family friend, Elizabeth Taylor. He and Taylor later married.
It was a major Hollywood scandal — the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston love triangle of its day — and it honed Fisher’s scepticism toward fame from an early age.
“You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Fisher wrote in her 2008 memoir Wishful Drinking. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.”
She and her mother discussed their family life and Fisher’s struggles with fame, addiction and bipolar disorder in a joint appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2011.
BEYOND PRINCESS LEIA
Fisher may have cast a sceptical eye on the world of celebrity, but she did not let that keep her away from the camera.
Before Star Wars came along, she starred alongside Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn in the 1975 film Shampoo, a satire of American society in the late 1960s.
Fisher also had notable roles in a string of iconic 1980s films, including The Blues Brothers, Hannah and Her Sisters, The ‘Burbs and When Harry Met Sally, and a string of television cameos, appearing either as herself or as a thinly veiled version of herself, on shows like Ellen, The Big Bang Theory and 30 Rock.
MENTAL HEALTH ADVOCACY
She was an advocate for reducing the stigma associated with mental illness and spoke candidly about her
as an infant being held by in Hollywood in January 1957. AP pic
struggle with addiction and bipolar disorder and her experience with electroconvulsive therapy.
In a column published last month by The Guardian, she advised a young person who wrote to ask for advice on living with bipolar disorder to think of overcoming mental illness as “an opportunity to be heroic”.
“We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges,” she wrote. “That’s why it’s important to find a community — however small — of other bipolar people to share experiences and find comfort in the similarities.”
As news of her death spread, a community of sorts began to form spontaneously on social media, where many shared their own stories of living with mental illness.
A SKILLED, SARDONIC WRITER
Fisher was a prolific writer, and her personal struggles inspired much of her work.
She wrote eight books and was known as a talented screenwriter
with a keen ear for dialogue, but it was her autobiographical and semiautobiographical work that left perhaps the largest mark.
In Postcards from the Edge, a thinly veiled autobiography published in 1987 after she went into rehab in the wake of a near-fatal drug overdose, she told the story of a young actress struggling with drugs and the long shadow of her movie star mother.
The names were changed, but much of the story paralleled Fisher’s life. She adapted the book into a screenplay for a critically acclaimed 1990 film of the same name. It starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine in roles inspired by Fisher and her mother.
Fisher also wrote two wide-ranging and irreverent memoirs. In The Princess Diarist released last month, she wrote about filming Star Wars as a teenage actress and made headlines when she described an on-set affair with her married co-star Harrison Ford. As usual, her dog, Gary, accompanied her on the press tour.
She published Wishful Drinking in 2008, a book that grew out of a onewoman show of the same name. It tackled her tumultuous family life and her addiction and used an anecdote about director George Lucas to dictate what she wanted written in her eventual obituary.
The story went like this: Lucas instructed her that Princess Leia should not wear a bra under her long white dress because “there is no underwear in space”. The reason? Lucas said the lack of gravity made the human body expand, but not the fabric of an undergarment, which meant a person could be squeezed to death by straps and waistbands.
“Now I think that would make for a fantastic obit,” she wrote, “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.” NYT
The writer