Obituary - Carrie Fisher, actress, writer and star of Star Wars

Died: December 27, 2016

CARRIE Fisher, who has died aged 60 after a heart attack, was an actress and writer who was dogged by great troubles – with drugs, alcohol, men and mental illness – but was also trapped by her great success, as Princess Leia in the Star Wars films.

When she first took on the role in the 1970s, the 19-year-old actress thought she was appearing in an obscure science-fiction film written by an even more obscure film-maker, George Lucas. But when the movie was a success, the iconography of the role – the pastry-shaped hair buns, the gold bikini, the distant father-in-a-mask – defined her for good. “Princess Leia was famous,” she once said. “And I just happened to look amazingly like her.”

In many ways, the character of Leia was an attempt by Lucas to break free from the science-fiction sexism of the past and find something new, but it only partially succeeded. Leia was able, strong-willed and sharp-tongued, but she was also the only significant female character in a male-dominated movie and it would take another 40 years for the female characters in Star Wars to be action heroes in their own right.

Leia’s status as the sex object of the film was also in no doubt – her whole life, fans would tell Fisher that she was their first crush. Many of them, she joked, thought about her up to four times a day, and in the sit-com Friends, Ross’s greatest wish was for Rachel to dress in a gold bikini just like Leia in Return of the Jedi.

In real life, Fisher was much more interesting and had a hundred times Leia’s acerbity and wit, which, in a series of novels and memoirs, she applied to her own life in an attempt to understand it. And there was a lot to try to understand: a privileged but chaotic homelife wrecked by her father’s affair with Elizabeth Taylor, drug use, complicated relationships with men, including the father of her daughter who turned out to be gay, and depression and electroshock therapy. All of it and more (including the details of the affair she had with married father Harrison Ford while making Star Wars) came out in the memoirs.

Much of Fisher's writing focused on her childhood, which was extraordinary by any standards. Born in Burbank, California, her father was Eddie Fisher, the 50s crooner who had a hit with Oh! My Papa, and Debbie Reynolds, the Oscar-winning Hollywood star most famous for Singin’ in the Rain.

In the early days of their marriage, Reynolds and Fisher were one of the glittering couples of Hollywood, and the birth of Carrie and her brother Todd was big news (the first picture of Carrie was published when she just two hours old). It then went badly wrong, however, when her father left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband Mike Todd had died in a plane crash. Many years later, Fisher talked about it with her usual dark humour. “My father flew to Elizabeth’s side, gradually making his way to her front,” she said.

Reynolds then married again, to a much older businessman Harry Karl, who became Fisher’s stepfather. But her childhood was Hollywood: she grew up visiting sets and watching movies being made and started appearing in her mother’s nightclub act when she was 13 years old.

At first, Fisher was reluctant to consider showbusiness as a career but when a producer offered her a nightclub act of her own, Fisher’s mother suggested acting school instead, which is what she did, winning a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London when she was 17. She remembered that time in the early 1970s as among the best of her life; she was just a student among students, she said, and it was the only unexamined time of her very public life.

Her first film appearance was Shampoo, a 1975 romantic comedy in which she played a teenager who propositions her mother’s boyfriend played by Warren Beatty. But Star Wars was just around the corner.

George Lucas had been carrying out auditions for his science-fiction project with Brian De Palma, who was also looking for a young female star for his horror movie Carrie. In the end, De Palma chose Sissy Spacek for Carrie, and Fisher was offered Leia, the role having nearly gone to Jodie Foster.

From the start, Fisher found Lucas difficult and taciturn on Star Wars, joking that he needed a special effects company to change his facial expression. In fact, Fisher said that in the entire time she worked with Lucas he only hear him give two pieces of direction: “faster” and “more intense”. She was told though that she had to lose ten pounds for the role and 40 years later – in a reflection perhaps of how little had changed for women in film – she would be again told to lose weight for The Force Awakens, the 2015 sequel.

Once on set in Star Wars, wearing the ridiculous hairstyle that she was too afraid to object to, Fisher took to the role with enthusiasm but some confusion about what was actually going on. She took shooting lessons off the same man who taught Robert De Niro to shoot in Taxi Driver and fired off the one-liners beautifully in a faux British accent.

What she never realised was that the film had any prospect of being a success. It was, she thought, just a goofy science-fiction movie and, besides, she was distracted by an affair with her co-star Harrison Ford, which she wrote about in her most recent memoirs, The Princess Diarist, which was published just before her death.

Fisher was also going drugs while making Star Wars. She had first tried them when was 13 and came across a bag of marijuana that tenants in her parents’ house had left behind. By the time she was 19 and making Star Wars, she was on hallucinogens and painkillers.

The drug-taking would eventually form the basis of Fisher’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge, which was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. She said drugs were an escape, but it was also about putting “the monster in a box”. “I wanted to be less,” she said, “so I took more.”

In 1985, she overdosed on Percodan and had to have her stomach pumped. She was also struggling with emotional difficulties and mental health problems, later diagnosed as manic depression – problems which were only exacerbated by the death of her friend Greg Stevens. In a move which even Fisher struggled to understand, to cope with Stevens’ death she started using the very drug, OxyContin, that had killed him.

Her personal relationships were also chaotic and dramatic. Her mother was loving but also eccentric and competitive, but it Fisher’s relationship with men that were particularly difficult. For 12 years on and off, she dated the singer Paul Simon, and was married to him for two, but she was divorced by the time she was 28 and by 29 she was in rehab. During one of their epic fights while Simon was taking Fisher to the airport, she turned to him and said “You’ll feel bad if I crash.” He shrugged and said “Maybe not”. Fisher’s later relationship with Bryan Lourd, the father of her daughter Billie was complicated in a different way when he came out as gay.

One of the lowest points was when Fisher underwent electroshock therapy in an attempt to control her depression. “I didn’t necessarily feel like dying,” she said, “but I’d been feeling a lot like not being alive.” She also joined Alcoholics Anonymous in an attempt to control her drinking, relapsing several times.

As for Fisher’s career, it struggled to recover from the success of Star Wars. There were two sequels in the 1980s, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and last year another sequel The Force Awakens, in which Fisher, Ford and Mark Hamill all reprised their roles from the original trilogy.

She did have some success away from Star Wars though, including in When Harry Met Sally, the romantic comedy about friendships between men and women that was a huge hit in 1989. Fisher played Meg Ryan’s best friend Marie. Later, she had a cameo role in the cult Channel 4 sit-com Catastrophe.

She also appeared in cameos and spoofs sending up herself and her most famous character, including in The Big Bang Theory, Lego Star Wars and Robot Chicken. A computer-generated version of Leia also makes a surprise appearance at the end of this year’s Star Wars film, Rogue One.

Fisher also found considerable success as a writer, publishing four novels and three editions of memoir, all of which were full of her self-deprecating humour: Wishful Drinking in 2008, Shockaholic in 2011 and The Princess Diarist in 2016.

Fisher once told her friends that she wanted her obituary to report that she had been “drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra”. The sad reality was a heart attack on a flight to LA after a British tour to promote her new book. But there was no doubt about the nature of her life: dramatic, colourful, bizarre and often darkly amusing.

Carrie Fisher is survived by her daughter, Billie, from her relationship with Bryan Lourd, her mother and her brother, Todd.