Behind Princess Leia stood one of Hollywood's busiest and funniest script doctors
Carrie Fisher became famous at twenty as Princess Leia, but much of her working life happened on the page. She turned her own chaotic Hollywood upbringing into a bestselling first novel, and for years studios quietly paid her to sharpen other writers' scripts, from Hook and Sister Act to the Star Wars prequels.
Fisher was born in Burbank on October 21, 1956, to actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher. When she was two, her father left for Elizabeth Taylor, a scandal that shaped her childhood. A self-described bookworm, she read classics and wrote poetry, then quit Beverly Hills High School after joining her mother in the Broadway revival of Irene. She spent 18 months at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and later enrolled at Sarah Lawrence without finishing.
Her film debut came in Shampoo in 1975, and two years later George Lucas cast her opposite Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford in Star Wars. She played Leia through Return of the Jedi and again in The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, which was released after her death and dedicated to her, and The Rise of Skywalker, built partly from unused earlier footage. Along the way she appeared in The Blues Brothers, where Dan Aykroyd saved her from choking on a Brussels sprout, Hannah and Her Sisters and When Harry Met Sally.
Postcards from the Edge, published in 1987, satirised her late-1970s drug addiction and life with Debbie Reynolds. Sales made it a bestseller, and her own screenplay for the 1990 film, starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, earned a BAFTA nomination. From 1991 to 2005 she polished scripts without credit, and a 1992 magazine piece named her among the most sought-after fixers in town. She eventually quit, grumbling that studios now collected rewrite ideas for free.
Her one-woman show Wishful Drinking ran from Los Angeles to Broadway's Studio 54 and became a book, an HBO special and a Grammy-nominated audiobook. She was praised for speaking openly about bipolar disorder and addiction. Fisher died in December 2016 at 60, days after falling ill on a flight from London to Los Angeles. A posthumous Grammy followed, and in 2023 a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Source: Carrie Fisher
