Ms. Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo.
Celebrities and fans paid tribute to the actress Carrie Fisher, who died on Tuesday at the age of 60. Her death came days after a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles.
By MEGAN SPECIA on Publish DateDecember 27, 2016. Photo by Lucasfilm Ltd./20th Century Fox, via Photofest. Watch in Times Video »Wielding blaster pistols, piloting futuristic vehicles and, to her occasional chagrin, wearing strange hairdos and a revealing metal bikini, she reprised the role in three more films — “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980, “Return of the Jedi” in 1983 and, 32 years later, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general.
Lucasfilm said on Tuesday that Ms. Fisher had completed her work in an as-yet-untitled eighth episode of the main “Star Wars” saga, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017.
Winning the admiration of countless fans, Ms. Fisher never played Leia as helpless. She had the toughness to escape the clutches of the monstrous gangster Jabba the Hutt and the tenderness to tell Han Solo, as he is about to be frozen in carbonite, “I love you.” (Solo, played by Harrison Ford, caddishly replies, “I know.”)
Offscreen, Ms. Fisher was open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She gave her dueling dispositions the nicknames Roy (“the wild ride of a mood,” she said) and Pam (“who stands on the shore and sobs”). She channeled her struggles with depression and substance abuse into fiercely comic works, including the semiautobiographical novel “Postcards From the Edge” and the one-woman show “Wishful Drinking,” which she turned into a memoir.
For all the attention she received for playing Princess Leia, Ms. Fisher enjoyed poking wicked fun at the character, as well as at the fantastical “Star Wars” universe. “Who wears that much lip gloss into battle?” she asked in a recent memoir, “The Princess Diarist.”
Having seen fame’s light and dark sides, Ms. Fisher did not take it too seriously, or consider it an enduring commodity.
Dressing Up as Princess Leia: Share Your Photos
Did you or a family member ever dress up as Princess Leia? We’d like to see your photos and the story behind them.
As she wrote in “The Princess Diarist”:
“Perpetual celebrity — the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture — is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali.”
Carrie Frances Fisher was born on Oct. 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was the first child of her highly visible parents (they later had a son, Todd), and said in “Wishful Drinking” that, while her mother was under anesthetic delivering her, her father fainted.
“So when I arrived,” Ms. Fisher wrote, “I was virtually unattended! And I have been trying to make up for that fact ever since.”
In 1959, Ms. Reynolds divorced Eddie Fisher in the wake of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married that same year. (Ms. Taylor later left him to marry Richard Burton.)
Any semblance of a normal childhood was impossible for Ms. Fisher. At 15, she played a debutante in the Broadway musical “Irene,” which starred her mother, and appeared in Ms. Reynolds’s Las Vegas nightclub act. At 17, Ms. Fisher made her first movie, “Shampoo” (1975), Hal Ashby’s satire of Nixon-era politics and the libidinous Los Angeles culture of the time, in which she played the precocious daughter of a wealthy woman (Lee Grant) having an affair with a promiscuous hairdresser (Warren Beatty).
She was one of roughly two dozen young actresses considered for the role of Princess Leia in Mr. Lucas’s marathon casting sessions for “Star Wars.” (Cindy Williams, Amy Irving, Sissy Spacek and Jodie Foster were among those who also read for the part.)
Video
Carrie Fisher and the Legacy of Leia
Manohla Dargis, film critic for The New York Times, remembers Carrie Fisher, whose career was defined — for better or for worse — by her role as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” films.
Publish DateDecember 27, 2016. Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times. Many of Ms. Fisher’s line readings from that film have since become part of the cinematic canon: her repeated, almost hypnotic exhortation, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”; her wryly unimpressed reaction when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) arrives in disguise to rescue her from a detention cell: “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”
“Star Wars” became a financial and cultural phenomenon, launching more movies and a merchandising machine that splashed Ms. Fisher’s likeness on all manner of action figures and products while casting her into an uneasy limelight.
She partied with the Rolling Stones during the making of “The Empire Strikes Back,” hosted “Saturday Night Live” and had romantic relationships with Dan Aykroyd (with whom she appeared in “The Blues Brothers”) and Paul Simon. She and Mr. Simon had a marriage that lasted less than a year, and he was inspired to write his song “Hearts and Bones” about their time together.
As its lyrics go:
Two people were married
The act was outrageous
The bride was contagious
She burned like a bride.
These events may have had some effect
On the man with the girl by his side.
In “The Princess Diarist,” she admitted what many fans had long suspected: During the filming of the first “Star Wars” movie, she and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had an affair.
Ms. Fisher acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970s and ’80s and later said that she was using cocaine while making “The Empire Strikes Back.”
In 1985, after filming a role in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” she had a nearly fatal drug overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program in Los Angeles. Those experiences later became grist for her caustic, comic novel “Postcards From the Edge,” whose chapters are variously presented as letters, diary entries, monologues and third-person narratives.
Video
Times Talks: Carrie Fisher
Ms. Fisher discussed her life and career, including the legendary Star Wars Holiday Special, with The Times's David Carr as part of the Times Talks series.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish DateJanuary 12, 2010. Photo by Chris Pizzello/Associated Press.WAs the main character, Suzanne, writes of her rehab stay: “Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, ‘Instant gratification takes too long.’”
The book was later made into a movie, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Ms. Fisher. Released in 1990, it starred Meryl Streep as Suzanne and Shirley MacLaine as her movie-star mother.
On film, Ms. Fisher also played the scene-stealing best friend of Meg Ryan’s title character in the 1989 romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally…” On television, she played satirical versions of herself on shows like “Sex and the City” and “The Big Bang Theory.” She had a recurring role on the British comedy “Catastrophe” (seen here on Amazon) as the mother of the character played by Rob Delaney, one of the show’s creators.
Her survivors include her mother; her brother, Todd; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with the talent agent Bryan Lourd; and her half sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.
s. Fisher had a Dorothy Parker-like presence on Twitter, where she ruminated on the inexplicable mania surrounding “Star Wars” and on her French bulldog, Gary, in playful messages filled with emoji.
Last year, after the release of “The Force Awakens,” she wrote, in part: “Please stop debating about whether OR not [eye emoji] aged well. unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My BODY hasn’t aged as well as I have.”
Correction: December 27, 2016 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misspelled the surname of the spokesman who confirmed the death. He is Simon Halls, not Hall.
A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Film Princess, Fame’s Light and Dark Sides.
You need to be a member of NASTYMIXX to add comments!
Join NASTYMIXX