Carrie Fisher

• 1. Introduction

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  Carrie Frances Fisher once wrote that no matter how she died, she wanted it reported that she had drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra. After her death in December 2016, several news outlets honored the request. That single line tells you nearly everything about who she was: an actress famous enough to dictate the terms of her own obituary, and a writer sharp enough to make that obituary funny.

  Fisher was born on the 21st of October 1956, in Burbank, California, to two of the most famous performers of their generation. Her father was singer Eddie Fisher. Her mother was actress Debbie Reynolds. She grew up in the bright, fractured light of celebrity, dropped out of high school to perform on Broadway at sixteen, and by twenty was playing one of the most iconic roles in film history. She spent the next four decades refusing to be defined by it.

  She was a bestselling novelist, a celebrated script doctor, a candid and often funny public advocate for people living with bipolar disorder and addiction. She died on the 27th of December 2016, at age 60. What remains is a body of work that sprawls across novels, screenplays, stage shows, and the force of a public voice that she never once agreed to quiet.

• 2. A Famous Childhood

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  Carrie Fisher was two years old when her parents' marriage ended in 1959. The cause was a public scandal: shortly after the death of actor Mike Todd, it emerged that Eddie Fisher had been having an affair with Todd's widow, Elizabeth Taylor. Eddie Fisher and Taylor married that same year and divorced in 1964. His third marriage, to actress Connie Stevens, produced two more daughters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, Carrie's half-sisters.

  Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, married again in 1960, to Harry Karl, who owned a chain of shoe stores. That marriage lasted until 1973, when Fisher was seventeen. Between the divorces, the remarriages, and the tabloid coverage, Fisher grew up in a household where fame was simply the condition of daily life.

  She responded by hiding. Fisher retreated into books as a child and became known in her family as the bookworm. She spent her earliest years reading classic literature and writing poetry. When she enrolled at Beverly Hills High School, it looked like a conventional education might follow. It did not. At sixteen, she appeared as a debutante and singer in the hit Broadway revival Irene in 1973, performing alongside her mother. The stage work interrupted her schooling and she dropped out. By the following year, she had enrolled at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, where she spent eighteen months. She was later accepted to Sarah Lawrence College, where she intended to study the arts, but left without graduating.

  Her paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her mother had been raised a Nazarene and was of English and Scots-Irish descent. Fisher herself described her religious position in later life as that of an enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God.

• 3. Princess Leia

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  George Lucas cast Fisher as Princess Leia in his 1977 space opera Star Wars, opposite Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford. Fisher was not yet twenty-one when the film was shot. The role made her one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

  Her film debut had come two years earlier in Shampoo, a Columbia Pictures comedy filmed in mid-1974, in which she played the precociously seductive Lorna Karpf at age seventeen. Star Wars was a different order of magnitude. Fisher, Hamill, and Ford were not close during filming, but the commercial success of the picture drew them together.

  She reprised the role in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and appeared with her Star Wars co-stars on the cover of the 12th of July 1980, issue of Rolling Stone to promote the film. In 1983, she returned as Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi and posed in the character's now-famous metal bikini on the cover of the Summer 1983 issue of Rolling Stone. That costume went on to develop a following of its own.

  In The Princess Diarist, a memoir released in November 2016, Fisher revealed that she and Harrison Ford had conducted a three-month affair during the filming of the original Star Wars in 1976. The book was based on diaries she had kept during the shoot. Her audiobook recording of the memoir earned her the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album, awarded thirteen months after her death.

  Decades later, she confirmed her return to the role. In a January 2014 interview, she said that she, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill were expected to report to work for the new sequel in March or April and that she would like to wear her old cinnamon buns hairstyle again but with white hair. Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened worldwide on the 18th of December 2015. Fisher had completed filming her scenes for The Last Jedi shortly before her death, and director Rian Johnson stated that many of her own ideas made it into the film.

• 4. The Writer

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  Fisher published her first novel, Postcards from the Edge, in 1987. The book was semi-autobiographical, fictionalizing and satirizing her drug addiction in the late 1970s and her relationship with her mother. It became a bestseller and earned her the Los Angeles Pen Award for Best First Novel.

  She adapted the novel herself for the 1990 Columbia Pictures film version, which starred Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Quaid. The screenplay earned Fisher a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She had, in her own words, already played the protagonist. When asked why she did not take the role of the character named Suzanne in the film, she said simply: "I've already played Suzanne."

  Four more books of her own followed over the next decades. Surrender the Pink appeared in 1990 and Delusions of Grandma in 1993. The Best Awful There Is, a sequel to Postcards, was published in 2004. Her 2011 book Shockaholic described in detail her experience with electroconvulsive therapy treatments, which she received at one point every six weeks to, as she put it, blow apart the cement in her brain. By 2014, she said she was no longer receiving the treatment.

  Wishful Drinking, published in December 2008, was drawn from her one-woman stage show of the same name. She had first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles between November 2006 and January 2007. The show toured extensively, played the Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Hartford Stage, the Arena Stage, and reached Broadway at Studio 54, where it ran from October 2009 until January 2010. In 2010, HBO aired a feature-length documentary based on a live performance. The audiobook recording of Wishful Drinking earned her a Grammy nomination in the Best Spoken Word Album category.

• 5. The Script Doctor

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  Alongside her own novels and plays, Fisher spent roughly fifteen years as one of the most sought-after script doctors in Hollywood. An Entertainment Weekly article from May 1992 described her as one of the most sought-after doctors in town. Her work was largely uncredited, which was the nature of the trade.

  She tightened scripts for Hook in 1991 and Sister Act in 1992. She wrote some of Rene Russo's dialogue for Lethal Weapon 3 and also worked on Outbreak, which starred Russo as well. The Wedding Singer in 1998 and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot both received her attention. George Lucas hired her to polish scripts for his 1992 television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and to refine the dialogue for the Star Wars prequel scripts.

  Her expertise in the craft made her one of the interviewers chosen for the screenwriting documentary Dreams on Spec in 2007. In a December 2008 interview, she reflected on why she had stepped back from the work: "It was a long, very lucrative episode of my life. But it's complicated to do that. Now in order to get a rewrite job, you have to submit your notes for your ideas on how to fix the script. So they can get all the notes from all the different writers, keep the notes and not hire you. That's free work and that's what I always call life-wasting events."

  She had effectively retired from script doctoring by around 2004 and 2005. In the same December 2008 interview, she said: "I did it for many years, and then younger people came to do it and I started to do new things."

• 6. Bipolar Disorder and Addiction

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  Fisher spoke publicly about her bipolar disorder and her addictions to cocaine and prescription medication during appearances on programs including 20/20 and The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive with Stephen Fry. She described her drug use as a form of self-medication, using pain medication such as Percodan to dial down the manic aspect of her condition.

  She gave nicknames to her two bipolar moods. Roy she described as the wild ride of a mood. Pam was the one who stands on the shore and sobs. Speaking to Psychology Today in 2001, she said: "Drugs made me feel more normal. They contained me."

  In 1985, after months of sobriety, she accidentally overdosed on a combination of prescription medication and sleeping pills and was rushed to the hospital. That sequence of events became the material for Postcards from the Edge. She revealed in one interview that she had used cocaine during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, noting that she had slowly realized she was doing a bit more drugs than other people and losing her choice in the matter.

  In 2016, Harvard College gave Fisher its Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. The award citation noted that her forthright activism and outspokenness about addiction, mental illness, and agnosticism had advanced public discourse on these issues with creativity and empathy. She also served as an honorary board member for the International Bipolar Foundation and received the Golden Heart Award in 2014 for her work with the Midnight Mission.

  Her daughter Billie Lourd, born in 1992, stated after Fisher's death that her mother had battled drug addiction and mental illness her entire life and had been purposefully open in all of her work about the social stigmas surrounding these diseases.

• 7. Death and Legacy

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  On the 23rd of December 2016, Fisher was aboard United Airlines Flight 935 from London to Los Angeles when she suffered a medical emergency around fifteen minutes before landing. A passenger near her reported that she had stopped breathing, and another passenger performed CPR until paramedics arrived. She was taken by ambulance to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and placed on a ventilator.

  Four days later, on the morning of the 27th of December 2016, Fisher died at UCLA Medical Center at age 60. A June 2017 report from the Los Angeles County coroner's office stated that the exact cause of death could not be determined, but that sleep apnea and the buildup of fatty tissue on the walls of arteries were among contributing factors. The full report also noted that Fisher had cocaine in her system, as well as traces of heroin, other opiates, and MDMA, though investigators could not determine when the drugs had been taken or whether they contributed to her death.

  The day after her death, her mother Debbie Reynolds suffered a stroke at the home of her son Todd, where the family was planning Fisher's burial arrangements. Reynolds died later that afternoon. According to Todd, Reynolds had said "I want to be with Carrie" immediately before the stroke. A joint private memorial was held for the two of them on the 5th of January 2017. Fisher was cremated; a portion of her ashes was placed beside Reynolds in a crypt at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. The remainder of those ashes are held in a giant novelty Prozac pill.

  Fisher was posthumously made a Disney Legend in 2017. She received a posthumous Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album the following year for her recording of The Princess Diarist. On the 4th of May 2023 -- Star Wars Day -- she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the 27th of October 2023, James Blunt released an album including a track called Dark Thought, written about her death.