 "Carrie Fisher")
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 both the role of Leia and to a series of keenly observed books that skewered celebrity and brought gallows humor to her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness.
Born into a prominent Hollywood family, Ms. Fisher was the sharp-tongued 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 Ms. Fisher’s life outside of “Star Wars.”
A Child of Hollywood
Ms. Fisher lived her entire life in the spotlight. She was the daughter of Debbie Reynolds, a movie star, and Eddie Fisher, a pop singer, but their glamorous world came crashing down when her father had an affair with a family friend, Elizabeth Taylor. They later married.
It was a major Hollywood scandal — the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston love triangle of its day — and helped hone Ms. Fisher’s skepticism toward fame from an early age.
“You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Ms. 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 Ms. Fisher’s struggles with fame, addiction and bipolar disorder in a joint appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2011.
Beyond Princess Leia
Ms. Fisher may have cast a skeptical 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.
She 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.”
She also had a string of television cameos, appearing either as herself or as a thinly veiled version of herself, on shows including “Ellen,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “30 Rock.”
Mental Health Advocacy
Ms. Fisher was an advocate for reducing the stigma associated with mental illness and spoke candidly about her struggle with addiction and bipolar disorder and her experience with electroconvulsive therapy.
In a column published last month by The Guardian, Ms. Fisher 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 on Tuesday, 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
Ms. 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 semi-autobiographical work that left perhaps the largest mark.
In “Postcards From the Edge,” a thinly veiled autobiography published in 1987 after Ms. Fisher went to rehab in the wake of a near-fatal drug overdose, she told the story of a young actress struggling with both drugs and the long shadow of her movie-star mother.
The names were changed, but much of the story paralleled Ms. Fisher’s own 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 Ms. Fisher and her mother.
Ms. Fisher also wrote two wide-ranging and irreverent memoirs. In “The Princess Diarist,” released last month, Ms. Fisher 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.
Ms. Fisher published “Wishful Drinking” in 2008, a book that grew out of a one-woman show of the same name. It tackled her tumultuous family life and her addiction, and used an anecdote about the director, George Lucas, to dictate what she wanted written in her eventual obituary.
The story went like this: Mr. 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? Mr. Lucas said that 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,” Ms. Fisher 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.”
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
