Carrie Fisher is one of cinema’s most unusual characters — and perhaps Hollywood’s ultimate survivor. Thrust into the spotlight by the unexpected success of Star Wars in the late 1970s, she has always had an uneasy relationship with fame. The daughter of “America’s sweethearts” Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, she has never known an ordinary life. “You might say I’m the product of Hollywood inbreeding,” she writes. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.”
Fisher will be in the headlines again in the next few weeks. Her latest memoir, Shockaholic, to be published tomorrow, will cover, as part of her routinely vivid life, her friendship with the late Michael Jackson. She met Jackson through the woman who was briefly her stepmother, Elizabeth Taylor, who’ll provide another source of memoir entertainment.
The survivor of multiple pill and drug addictions — she is also forging an unlikely path as the public face of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which she undergoes regularly to treat bipolar disorder — Fisher, 55, has acted in more than 40 movies and had a hugely successful second career as a writer. She is the author of four novels, including the bestselling Postcards From the Edge, based on her own recovery from drug addiction.
Photo: Reuters
What has made her into a figure of fascination over the years is her sense of humor about herself: “It isn’t all sweetness and light-sabers.” Then there’s her honesty about her mental health and drug problems, sometimes seen as narcissistic. “I just have basically too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two.” She says about her new book: “Bad news for anyone who thought Carrie Fisher had stopped talking about herself.”
In recent months in the US, she has become best known after her 50-pound (23kg) weight loss as the face of diet company Jenny Craig. She also appears to have undergone something of a makeover in the facial area. Last year, unflattering photographs of her were published in which she was likened to Elton John. “I did not realize that I had signed an invisible contract when I wore the metal bikini [in Star Wars] stating that I would look exactly the same way for the rest of my life.”
At the beginning of this year, Fisher revealed on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she has ECT every six weeks to blow apart “the cement” in her brain and help her cope with depression.
Photo: Reuters
After overcoming the cocaine addiction she developed on the set of The Empire Strikes Back, Fisher reinvented herself as a wisecracking writer/performer able to lampoon Hollywood with an insider’s venom. In her one-woman Broadway show, she wore the Princess Leia wig and claimed: “George Lucas ruined my life.” The show was Tony- and Emmy-nominated.
Her memoir about alcoholism, Wishful Drinking, was on the New York Times bestseller list for months. (Although one review said: “Drinking seems to have been the least of her problems.”)
Fisher’s childhood was like something out of a movie. “It was my normal. I thought everybody had stepmothers living in bungalows at the Beverly Hills hotel wearing negligees.” She appeared on stage in Las Vegas from the age of 12.
Her father caused a scandal when he left Reynolds to have a passionate affair with Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was two. As she puts it: “My father was best friends with a man named Mike Todd. Mike Todd was married to Elizabeth Taylor. Mike Todd died in a plane crash and my father consoled Elizabeth Taylor with his penis.” When she was eight, her father and Taylor divorced but eventually daughter and stepmother became lifelong friends.
She is the sort of person who knows everyone and hosts celebrated parties. (She woke up after one to discover that her friend, political adviser R Gregory Stevens, had died in his sleep next to her in bed. “His body was worn out from drug use.”) Vanity Fair once claimed that “everybody in Hollywood loves Carrie Fisher.” She is best friends with When Harry Met Sally screenwriter Nora Ephron and set Jane Fonda up with her current partner, music producer Richard Perry, in 2009.
She still lives next door to her 79-year-old mother, in a house whose previous occupants include Bette Davis and the costume designer Edith Head. Fisher has said of the setup: “We couldn’t live next door to each other if we weren’t close — you can’t fake that. My mom is amazing. She’s a powerful, powerful being in a way that my father never was. Life mowed him over more.”
About her father, who died last year, she says: “I’ve always had a good relationship with him, but not a familial kind of relationship in a way. Dad was a very child-like man. So I took care of him.”
In some ways, her life is like Sunset Boulevard, but with a happy ending, thanks to all the years in therapy. She has one daughter, to whom she says she is “not an ordinary mom,” adding: “It’s not easy for her to have a mother who is bipolar and had a drug problem.”
She has written extensively about the bizarre relationship she had with her parents as a child. When she was 15, her mother gave her a vibrator for Christmas.
Star Wars is still her biggest bugbear and she seemed to admit in a recent interview that she regretted that it will be the one clip that flashes up at her Academy Awards obituary. Her film career had started two years earlier, alongside Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in Shampoo (1975). At the age of 19, she was cast in Star Wars because, she has joked, she “slept with some nerd. I hope it was George [Lucas].” (The interviewer asked: “You weren’t sure?” She replied: “I took too many drugs to remember.”)
Fisher has a love-hate relationship with Princess Leia, tending more to the hate end or at least extreme irony. (In Wishful Drinking, she writes about her irritation with Lucas’ insistence that there are no bras in space.) She survived an overdose while working on the Star Wars trilogy. “Slowly, I realized I was doing a bit more drugs than other people and losing my choice in the matter.”
She recently told the Daily Beast that the film ended up making her feel like Minnie Mouse because the “Princess Leia” brand completely took over her identity. Thirty years on, she added, the Star Wars franchise is still trading on that character: “The mistake was, I signed away my likeness for free. 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.
“As I’ve gone along, people will come to me and say, ‘We got the licensing from George Lucas to make these socks.’ So my daughter can walk around on my face. How much money could I have made from all this stuff? I don’t want to know. It’s too upsetting. Yet funny.”
Star Wars arguably limited her options as an actress, although she went on to memorable supporting roles in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and When Harry Met Sally (1989).
After the success of Postcards From the Edge, she also began working behind the scenes as one of Hollywood’s best script doctors.
Shockaholic will only enhance her reputation as Hollywood’s unofficial amateur therapist — and usually its most discreet, which is why accounts of her encounters with Michael Jackson will be hungrily analyzed for every last detail. (The therapist is a label she messes around with. She played one in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.)
In 2003, the singer James Blunt lived at her house while recording his first album, sparking rumors that they were having a relationship. This wasn’t the case, Fisher explained. “Absolutely not. But I did become his therapist. He was a soldier. This boy has seen awful stuff. It would have been unethical to sleep with my patient.”
Most of all, though, Fisher is a storyteller, very happy to make jokes at her own expense. Audiences love her bitterness: “Me having a tantrum in the corner for my cut of Star Wars toothpaste? I don’t want to get into it.”
Perhaps her role as Hollywood’s confessor will be her most fulfilling act yet. It’s maybe more balanced than all the wisecracks. As the New York Times says of her writing: “It’s sometimes like a smile so forced it must hurt.”
The Fisher file
Born
Beverly Hills, Oct. 21, 1956. Daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. Briefly married to singer Paul Simon in the early 1980s. Has one daughter, Billie, 19, with agent Bryan Lourd. Currently single “but not celibate.”
Best of times
In 1987, her novel about recovery from drug addiction, Postcards From the Edge, became a bestseller. The 1990 film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, took US$39 million at the box office.
Worst of times
On-off addictions to drugs and pills throughout the 1970s and 1980s and eventual diagnosis with bipolar disorder. As a teenager, she took so much acid that her parents called in the only LSD expert they knew: Cary Grant.
What she says
On her answering service: “Hello and welcome to Carrie’s voicemail. Due to recent electroconvulsive therapy, please pay close attention to the following options. Leave your name, number and a brief history as to how Carrie knows you and she’ll get back to you if this jogs her memory.”
What others say
“She is one of the rare inhabitants of La La Land who can actually write.” (New York Times)
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