Carrie Fisher

The Weight of a Crown of Ensaimadas

Debbie Reynolds was in the delivery room when she learned her husband was leaving her for Elizabeth Taylor. Carrie Fisher was born in 1956 amid the tabloid frenzy and magnesium flashes that never quite faded. Before turning twenty, she already knew that in Hollywood family is an elastic concept and loyalty comes with a contract.

Her debut in Shampoo in 1975 was brief. But it helped George Lucas notice the young woman who didn't seem afraid of fast-paced dialogue. At nineteen, she accepted a role in a science fiction film that no one in the industry quite understood.

The galaxy was both her prison and her fortune.

In 1977, the release of Star Wars violently shattered her anonymity. Lucas asked her to wrap her chest in duct tape because no one wore underwear in space. She accepted the absurdity with a irony that would become her best form of personal defense over the following decades.

Fisher earned a modest salary for the first film. But the real problem wasn't the money; it was losing control over her own image. Her face was on sheets, lunch boxes, and plastic dolls while she struggled with a mental health that was starting to crack.

Writing as Shock Therapy

Playing the princess was never her top priority. In the 1980s, the industry tried to pigeonhole her into light romantic comedies, but her mind ran at a different speed. After her time on The Blues Brothers and Hannah and Her Sisters, she decided it was more profitable to fix other people's scripts than to star in her own.

She published Postcards from the Edge in 1987. The novel was a settling of scores with her mother and with her own substance addiction. The book did so well that Mike Nichols adapted it for the big screen in 1990, with Meryl Streep in the lead role.

She became the highest-paid script doctor in Hollywood.

For years, Fisher rewrote dialogue for Sister Act, Hook, and Lethal Weapon 3 without appearing in the main credits. She earned six-figure sums per week of work. Her job was to inject rhythm and bite into female characters who were born flat on the screenwriters' pages.

But the glamour of the military briefings did not erase her personal struggles. In 1997, she had a psychotic episode that led to a hospital stay and a definitive diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Rather than hide it, she turned it into material for her stand-up routines and later books.

Brutal honesty was her only currency.

The return to the general's uniform

In 2015, she returned to play Leia in The Force Awakens under the direction of J.J. Abrams. She was asked to lose more than fifteen kilos to reprise the character. In interviews, she responded with her usual disdain for the aesthetic demands of an industry that only values eternal youth.

Her relationship with Paul Simon and later with Bryan Lourd left scars that she openly aired in her show Wishful Drinking. Fisher wasn't seeking sympathy but control over her own story. She preferred to laugh at her own failures before a gossip columnist could do it for her.

On December 23, 2016, she suffered a heart attack during a flight from London to Los Angeles. She died four days later at the UCLA Medical Center. Her mother passed away just twenty-four hours later from a stroke.

Disney had to use discarded footage and digital techniques to complete her role in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. The production cost of that film exceeded 275 million dollars. In 2023, Wonderwell, her last recorded performance, received a limited release, seven years before it reached commercial theaters.