Carrie Fisher has had a long list of achievements during her life and career, including recovering from drug addiction and penning an award-winning novel, but none of her accomplishments are likely to be remembered as well as her role as Princess Leia Organa in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Carrie Fisher was born into fame; she was born in Beverly Hills, California, on October 21, 1956, to Eddie Fisher, a singer frequently present in the top ten charts in the 1950s, and Debbie Reynolds, the well-known actress of the same era. When she was only two years old, her mother divorced her father, who in turn married actress Elizabeth Taylor. Growing up, Carrie Fisher knew she wanted to follow the same path to fame. She appeared on Broadway with her mother in 1973.
Fisher enrolled and studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama for a year and a half and made her first silver screen appearance in Shampoo, a 1975 comedy starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn. It was in 1977 that she laid her claim to fame with her first appearance as Princess Leia in George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode III: A New Hope, acting opposite Mark Hamill and would-be superstar Harrison Ford. Fisher’s return appearances in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi sealed her fate and possibly her identity. She gained a near-cult following as a sex symbol after her performance in Return of the Jedi.
During the period between the original Star Wars and the filming of the trilogy conclusion, she became addicted to drugs and made a poor performance, leaving little suspicion to the fact in The Star Wars Holiday Special, which was on television in 1978. She was struggling so fiercely with the addiction that she was nearly fired from the set of The Blues Brothers, in which she was filming a cameo appearance. By the time filming commenced for Return of the Jedi, Fisher had sought help and become clean and sober.
After the conclusion of the Star Wars trilogy, Carrie Fisher began work on her novel, Postcards from the Edge, published in 1987. With the help of Fisher, the novel was adapted into a screenplay and Columbia Pictures released the movie version of the novel starring Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLain, and Dennis Quaid. Though Carrie Fisher continued writing novels, she also made a few television and movie appearances, including a role in Scream 3. But it is her writing talents that are now sought after. Carrie Fisher has become a popular script doctor in Hollywood and she co-wrote the 1997 Academy Awards Celebration Ceremony.
In her personal life, Carrie Fisher has struggled with drug addiction, and now she is battling bipolar disorder. She has been married twice; first to Paul Simon, from 1983 to 1984, and next to Bryan Lourde, from 1993 to 1995, with whom she had one child. Fisher continues to work in film and television along with pursuing her successful writing and screenplay production career.
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