Princess Leia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Princess Leia Organa first appears on screen with the stolen plans for the Death Star hidden inside a small droid, R2-D2. She has just sent the droid off alone to find a Jedi named Obi-Wan Kenobi. Darth Vader boards her ship, captures her, and tortures her for the location of the Rebel base. She gives up nothing, not even when Grand Moff Tarkin threatens to destroy her home planet, Alderaan. She names an abandoned base on the planet Dantooine instead of the truth. Tarkin destroys Alderaan anyway. That is the Leia the world met in 1977, a princess of Alderaan and a member of the Imperial Senate. She was also an agent of the Rebel Alliance. She was played by Carrie Fisher, who was only 19 when she took the role. Decades and two more film trilogies later, Leia would be revealed as Darth Vader's daughter and Luke Skywalker's twin sister. She would fall in love with a smuggler named Han Solo. She would found and lead a Resistance against a new enemy called the First Order, and die still fighting for that cause. How did a character who began as a spoiled teenage princess in George Lucas's early drafts become a soldier with no family but a cause? And what turned her hairstyle and a metal bikini into two of the most debated images in the franchise?

• 2. Origins Of A Princess

  ›

  In 1999, George Lucas looked back at how the story that became Star Wars first took shape. He said: "The first version of the story talked about a princess and an old general. The second version involved a father, his son, and his daughter; the daughter was the heroine of the film. Now the daughter has become Luke, Mark Hamill's character. There was also the story of two brothers where I transformed one of them into a sister. The older brother was imprisoned, and the young sister had to rescue him and bring him back to their dad."

  The character went through several more changes before Lucas settled on Leia Organa. In one early draft, she was the spoiled teenage daughter of King Kayos and Queen Breha of Aquilae. In a later version, she became Luke's cousin, the daughter of Owen Lars and his wife Beru. A subsequent story synopsis made her Leia Antilles, the child of Bail Antilles from the peaceful world of Organa Major. By the fourth draft, she was Leia Organa of Alderaan, the version that reached the finished film.

  While developing The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas planned for Luke to have a twin sister who was not Leia, meant to be the focus of a separate film. After Empire finished production, Lucas was burnt out and abandoned his planned sequel trilogy. He still needed to explain the other potential Jedi that Yoda had mentioned, so he decided that Leia herself would be revealed as Luke's twin.

  An early draft of the Return of the Jedi screenplay gave Obi-Wan a different account of Luke's sister. In it, Luke's sister and their mother were sent to a distant star system for protection. Their mother died soon after, and the sister was adopted by the governor of Alderaan and his wife, both friends of Obi-Wan.

  None of these drafts is who audiences actually met when Star Wars opened in 1977. That Leia still needed someone to play her, and the search for that actress would pass over a long list of well-known names.

• 3. Finding Leia

  ›

  Carrie Fisher was cast over a long list of well-known actresses, including Karen Allen, Glenn Close, Farrah Fawcett, Anjelica Huston, Amy Irving, Jessica Lange, Terri Nunn, Linda Purl, Meryl Streep, and Cindy Williams. Jodie Foster was also offered the part, but turned it down because she was under contract with Disney. Mark Hamill, after meeting Fisher, said she defied his expectations. Though she was only five years younger than him, he viewed her as "older and wiser" than him in many ways.

  In 2014, Fisher looked back on what it meant to play the character. She said Leia is worried, angry, and "snarky" for much of the original trilogy, and that those qualities "aren't fun things to play." Fisher said she would rather have played the "wry and sardonic" Han Solo. She called killing Jabba the Hutt the most satisfying moment of her entire acting career.

  Fisher would return to the question of who Leia really was in a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, and again decades later as the franchise kept going.

• 4. More Than A Princess

  ›

  Anthony Breznican of Entertainment Weekly once summed up Leia in four words: a diplomat, spy, warrior, and undercover agent. Fisher herself put it more simply, calling her character a soldier. In her 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Fisher explained why: once Alderaan is gone, Leia has no friends or family left, only a cause, the Rebellion. Fisher claimed the character is often angry for a simple reason. That anger, she said, was the only tool the filmmakers knew to make her seem strong.

  Writing in The Washington Post in 2015, Alyssa Rosenberg examined that anger alongside Leia's relationship with Han Solo. Rosenberg praised Leia's courage and resiliency under pressure. She argued that Leia and Han clash because Leia insists on asserting her authority. Han automatically resists it, Rosenberg wrote, even as Leia keeps proving she deserves it. Discussing Han's attempt to get Leia to admit her feelings in The Empire Strikes Back, Rosenberg wrote: "Han's not wrong that if Leia doesn't figure out that she's a person with needs, she's going to burn out... In a way, it's an early confession of love: Han's anxious about the bounty hunters who are still pursuing him... But he would stay and give his love and support to Leia if she could just acknowledge that she needs him."

  After Return of the Jedi came out, Fisher offered her own take on how the character had been written: "She gets to be more feminine, more supportive, more affectionate. But let's not forget that these movies are basically boys' fantasies. So the other way they made her more female in this one was to have her take off her clothes."

• 5. The Long Rebellion

  ›

  Leia is rescued from the Death Star by Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, and the four escape aboard Han's ship, the Millennium Falcon. After analyzing the captured Death Star schematics, the Rebels find a small weakness in the battle station. Luke destroys it by firing torpedoes from his X-wing fighter, and afterward Leia honors Luke, Han, and Chewbacca for their heroism.

  Fisher later said that in the original script, when Luke and Han arrive to rescue her, she is unconscious, her eyes are yellow, and she is hanging upside down, an image that alludes to the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. She explained that the scene was changed because Chewbacca would have had to carry her for an extended period of time.

  In The Empire Strikes Back, Leia commands the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth. When Imperial forces attack, she leads the evacuation, then flees aboard the Falcon with Han, Chewbacca, and C-3PO. Hiding in an asteroid field, Leia and Han share a kiss. Needing repairs, Han turns to his old friend Lando Calrissian in Cloud City, but Lando has already betrayed them to the Empire. Vader freezes Han in carbonite and hands him to the bounty hunter Boba Fett; Leia confesses her love for Han as it happens. Escaping Cloud City, Leia senses through the Force that Luke is in danger. He was wounded during a lightsaber duel with Vader, so she orders Chewbacca to turn the ship around and rescue him.

  In Return of the Jedi, Leia infiltrates Jabba the Hutt's palace on Tatooine disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, and frees Han from the carbonite. Both are recaptured, and Jabba takes her prisoner. After Luke kills Jabba's pet rancor, the crime lord sentences the group to be fed to a deadly beast called the Sarlacc. They overpower their captors instead and escape the planet, returning to the Rebel base. The group then travels to the forest moon of Endor, joins forces with a tribe of Ewoks, and helps destroy the Empire's second Death Star.

  The 2005 prequel Revenge of the Sith fills in what happened before any of this: Padmé Amidala gives birth to Luke and Leia on Polis Massa, then dies. Leia is adopted by Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan and his wife, Queen Breha.

  Three decades after Return of the Jedi, that adopted daughter of Alderaan would lead an entirely new fight, this time as a general rather than a senator.

• 6. A New War

  ›

  Thirty years after the fall of the Empire, in 2015's The Force Awakens, Leia leads a new organization called the Resistance, formed to fight the First Order. She is also searching for her brother Luke, who vanished years earlier. After a battle on the planet Takodana, she reunites with Han Solo, and the two discuss their son, Ben Solo, who abandoned his Jedi training and fell to the dark side, becoming the First Order warlord Kylo Ren. Leia believes Ren can still be turned back and urges Han to try to bring him home. When Han finds Ren on Starkiller Base and asks him to abandon the First Order, Ren refuses and kills his own father. Leia senses Han's death through the Force, and later shares a moment of grief with a scavenger named Rey, who had come to see Han as a father figure.

  Although Leia appears as a trained Jedi in various Star Wars Legends stories, The Force Awakens does not show her that way. Director J.J. Abrams explained that leading the Resistance instead of training as a Jedi was "simply a choice that she made," while affirming that her strength with the Force remained part of who she is. Fisher described her character in the film as under "a lot of pressure," likely feeling defeated, tired, and angry. The performance earned Fisher a nomination for the 2016 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.

  In 2017's The Last Jedi, Leia is expelled into space when her ship is attacked, and she uses the Force to pull herself back on board. After recovering, she shoots and stuns the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron for mutinying against Vice Admiral Holdo. Luke, in self-imposed exile on the planet Ahch-To, projects himself through the Force to the Resistance stronghold on Crait, reunites with Leia, and apologizes for Ben's fall. Leia says her son is gone; Luke tells her that nobody is ever truly gone. While Luke distracts Ren and his troops, Leia and the remaining Resistance forces escape aboard the Falcon. Fisher finished filming her scenes shortly before she died, on the 27th of December 2016.

  Following Fisher's death, the trade publication Variety reported she had been slated to appear in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. Rather than create a digital version of her, Lucasfilm built the film around unused footage shot for The Force Awakens. Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd, who plays Lieutenant Connix throughout the sequel trilogy, stood in for a brief flashback scene; her face was digitally replaced with Fisher's, using imagery from Return of the Jedi. A later flashback reveals that Leia had abandoned her own Jedi training with Luke after seeing a vision of her son's death. During a duel between Rey and Ren on Kef Bir, Leia uses the last of her strength to reach out to Ren through the Force. Rey wounds him while he is distracted, then heals him as Leia dies. Rey later buries the lightsabers that belonged to Leia and Luke at the Lars homestead on Tatooine.

  Leia also makes a brief appearance in 2016's Rogue One, receiving the stolen Death Star plans moments before Star Wars begins. Since that story is set just before the original film, a computer-generated image of a young Carrie Fisher was superimposed over the actress Ingvild Deila, with archival audio used for the voice. A teenage Leia, voiced by Julie Dolan, also appears in a 2016 episode of the animated series Star Wars Rebels, sent on a secret mission for the Rebel Alliance. Executive producer Dave Filoni said the story was meant to show her developing leadership, and that in it, Leia is "almost a double agent," acting the part of loyalty to the Empire without believing in it. She also appears in the web series Forces of Destiny, voiced by Shelby Young, and in Star Wars Resistance, voiced by Rachel Butera and Carolyn Hennesy. In the 2022 series Obi-Wan Kenobi, a ten-year-old Leia is played by Vivien Lyra Blair. Writer Joby Harold said the production wanted an actor who could embody a young Carrie Fisher, and NPR's Eric Deggans wrote that Blair "practically channels Carrie Fisher's subversive, wisecracking spirit."

  None of this screen material touches the parallel story Leia lived in print, where a 1991 bestseller would launch an entirely different future for her.

• 7. An Expanded Galaxy

  ›

  Timothy Zahn's 1991 novel Heir to the Empire became a New York Times bestseller and launched what grew into a vast collection of Star Wars fiction set outside the films. Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, published between 1991 and 1993, begins five years after Return of the Jedi. In Heir to the Empire, Leia is married to Han and three months pregnant with twins, while Noghri commandos repeatedly try to kidnap her as part of Grand Admiral Thrawn's plan to restore the Empire. In the trilogy's second book, Dark Force Rising, Leia discovers that Vader and the Empire had deceived the Noghri, and by revealing the truth she turns the species to the New Republic's side. By 1993's The Last Command, she gives birth to the twins, Jaina and Jacen Solo, on the planet Coruscant.

  After The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, most of this material, produced between 1977 and 2014, was rebranded as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canon. Within that alternate timeline, Leia goes on to battle remnants of the Empire, becomes chief of state of the New Republic and a Jedi Master, and raises three children with Han: Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin Solo.

  The New Jedi Order series, published from 1999 to 2003, brings an alien invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong that devastates the galaxy. Chewbacca dies in the opening novel, Vector Prime, sending Han into a depression that creates a rift with Leia. They reconcile after Leia is gravely wounded at the Battle of Duro, but the war claims a heavier cost still: their son Anakin is killed during a mission against the invaders.

  In the Legacy of the Force series, published from 2006 to 2008, Han and Leia's son Jacen crosses to the dark side, believing it is the only way to save the galaxy. He becomes the Sith ruler Darth Caedus. In 2008's Invincible, his own sister, Jaina, kills him in a lightsaber duel. Afterward, Leia and Han adopt a child named Allana, disguising her identity as "Amelia" to protect her.

  In the comic series Dark Empire, published in 1991 and 1992, the resurrected Emperor Palpatine seduces Luke to the dark side and pursues Leia for an artifact called the Jedi Holocron. Leia resists him, escapes with the Holocron, and helps turn Luke back; together they destroy Palpatine with a Force storm of his own making. In the sequel series Dark Empire II, published in 1994 and 1995, Leia gives birth to a third child, Anakin Solo.

  None of this print mythology is what most people picture when they hear the name Leia. That image was fixed on screen, by two buns of hair in 1977 and, six years later, by a single costume.

• 8. Cinnamon Buns And Chains

  ›

  In 2008, Empire magazine ranked Leia the 89th greatest film character of all time. In 2013, cartoonist Jeffrey Brown published Star Wars: Vader's Little Princess, a comic strip book pairing Darth Vader with a young Leia in humorous father-daughter scenes; it became a bestseller. Leia's likeness has since spread across statuettes, action figures, household items, clothing, office supplies, food products, and even shampoo sold in Leia-shaped bottles. In her one-woman show Wishful Drinking, Fisher called the Princess Leia Pez dispenser a "merchandising horror." In a 2011 interview, she explained why she never profited from any of it: "I signed away my likeness for free. In those days, there was no such thing as a 'likeness'... There was no merchandising tied to movies. No one could have known the extent of the franchise. Not that I don't think I'm cute or anything, but when I looked in the mirror, I didn't think I was signing away anything of value." In 2014, following the Disney acquisition, the Disney Store said it had no plans for future Leia products; after public criticism, Disney told Time it would release several after all.

  Leia's hairstyle from the 1977 film, two large buns worn one on each side of her head, became known as the "doughnut" or "cinnamon buns" look. Asked about its origins in a 2002 interview, Lucas said he was aiming for "a kind of Southwestern Pancho Villa woman revolutionary look" drawn from "turn-of-the-century Mexico." An exhibit at the Denver Art Museum later credited a specific revolutionary, identified as Clara de la Rocha, as an inspiration, and noted a further influence from a hairstyle worn by indigenous Hopi women. Empire magazine offered a different theory, tracing the look to Queen Fria, a character from the 1930s Flash Gordon comic serial. A February 1978 cover story in the British teen magazine Jackie gave readers step-by-step instructions for replicating the buns at home. The style has since been referenced or parodied in The Muppet Show in 1980, the film Spaceballs in 1987, and the short film Hardware Wars back in 1978; in the series Scream Queens, Fisher's own daughter Billie Lourd wears earmuffs as a nod to it.

  Leia has drawn sustained feminist analysis. David Bushman, the television curator at the Paley Center for Media, said in 2012 that Leia, while not perfect, was a creditable character when she debuted, calling her defiant, assertive, and strong. Diana Dominguez, in a 2007 article, cited Leia as a welcome change from earlier portrayals of women on screen: "Here was a woman who could play like and with the boys, but who didn't have to become one of the boys... She isn't a flirty sex-pot, tossing her hair around seductively to distract the enemy... She doesn't play the role of 'maternal caretaker'... Leia is a hero without losing her gendered status." Alyssa Rosenberg called Leia a "great heroine" whose power comes from her "political conviction and acumen," and argued that both Luke and Han become full participants in the Rebellion because of Leia's influence, while she "finds a partner in Han, acknowledging that personal happiness can help her sustain her commitment." In a 2012 essay, Ray Merlock and Kathy Merlock Jackson cited Leia as a successor to earlier heroines Wilma Deering of Buck Rogers and Dale Arden of Flash Gordon, arguing that after Leia, "princesses are no longer passive and salvaged simply with a kiss," and tracing her influence into later Disney princesses and warriors like Ellen Ripley and Xena. A. O. Scott of The New York Times called her a precursor to Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen. Mark Hamill has described Leia as "effortlessly feminist," a character who does not need rescuing and who makes Han and Luke look foolish. Fisher said the identity of Leia "eclipses" every other identity she has had, adding on another occasion, "I think I am Princess Leia, and Princess Leia is me."

  At the start of Return of the Jedi, Jabba the Hutt keeps Leia as a captive and forces her into a brass bikini that fans came to call the "Metal Bikini" or "Gold Bikini." Writing in Wired in 2006, Philip Chien said the image of Fisher in that costume was "burned into the sweaty subconscious of a generation of fanboys hitting puberty in the spring of 1983." Fisher pushed back on the label in 2015: "I am not a sex symbol, so that's an opinion of someone. I don't share that." Rosenberg, addressing critics who felt the costume undercut Leia's status as a feminist hero, argued that "she's biding her time for the moment when she can put that fury into action," and that Leia uses the very chains binding her to strangle Jabba to death rather than being condemned to passivity by the outfit. The filmmaker Letia Clouston made a similar point, noting that Leia "single-handedly killed Jabba" despite the costume. The bikini itself was designed by Aggie Guerard Rodgers and Nilo Rodis-Jamero, inspired by the work of illustrator Frank Frazetta, according to Rodgers; a metal top and plated bottom covered a red silk loincloth, worn with leather boots, serpentine jewelry, and the chain and collar Leia later used against Jabba. Multiple versions were built, including rigid metal pieces by sculptor Richard Miller for still scenes and a rubber version Fisher and stuntwoman Tracy Eddon wore for action, fitted from a mold of Fisher's own torso. Fisher joked that the costume was "what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell." An original rubber version of the costume sold for $96,000 at auction in 2015, and another sold for $175,000 in 2024. When a 2015 news segment raised the difficulty of explaining the outfit, and its chain, to children, Fisher offered her own answer: "Tell the kids that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn't like it."