Movie Notes

Carrie Fisher dies

by Charlie Smith on December 27th, 2016 at 10:53 AM
    1 of 1 2 of 1

      The actor and author best known to the world as Princess Leia in Star Wars has passed away

      Carrie Fisher was 60 years old when she died in a Los Angeles hospital today.

      It came four days after she suffered a heart attack on a plane.

      In addition to Star Wars movies, Fisher also appeared in Hannah and Her Sisters, When Harry Met Sally..., Shampoo, and The Blues Brothers.

      She played Princess Leia for a final time in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, which was released late last year.

      Her death was commemorated on Twitter by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, a long-time fan of Star Wars.

      Fisher's best-selling book, Postcards from Edge, was based in part on her relationship with her mother, actor-dancer Debbie Reynolds.

      In 1990, the book was adapted into a movie starring Meryl Streep, who played a cocaine-sniffing actor named Suzanne Vale.

      Streep told the Georgia Straight's Ian Caddell at the time that she was attracted to the project because of Fisher's dialogue.

      "I like smart talk," Streep said. "I’m sort of verbal and I like stuff that’s smart and witty. I just wish I could have her write my interviews.”

      In an interview with Caddell in the same year, Fisher revealed that she didn't have a relationship with her father, singer Eddie Fisher, during childhood.

      That's because Eddie Fisher left Reynolds for her friend, Elizabeth Taylor.

      “I needed my mother to be all right, because I never saw my father [Eddie Fisher] as a kid," Carrie Fisher said. "She was who I was going to be when I grew up, so it was important to me that she stay in good shape. But after she had raised two kids and done a stage play on Broadway, she ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. She was in a lot of trouble, but I was always trying to get her to be all right. For me. So I was a pain in the ass."

      Caddell concluded that the real Princess Leia "is far more irreverent and tenacious than the script-writers for the Star Wars herione could ever have imagined".

      He also noted at the time that Fisher's voice could be heard 50 feet from the interview room.

      Fisher acknowledged in that interview that Postcards from the Edge had "certain situations" rooted in reality, but the mother-daughter relationship in the film was not autobiographical.

      "My mother and I haven’t fought since I was a teenager, so I had to say, ‘What if?’ Then, when we put it on film, I got upset because it seemed so real, and I started thinking not only are people going to think this happened, but I had to think about it a minute and thought, ‘Maybe this did happen’.”

      On Christmas Day, Reynolds tweeted that her daughter was in "stable condition".

      Later in life, Fisher became a mental-health advocate.

      Prior to her heart attack, she was on tour promoting her new memoir, The Princess Diarist.

      Comments