By Dave Itzkoff / New York Times News Service
CARRIE FISHER, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movie franchise, died on Tuesday. She was 60.
A family spokesman, Simon Halls, said Fisher died at 8:55 am. She had a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday and had been hospitalized in Los Angeles.
Fisher, the daughter of pop singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, went on to use her perch among Hollywood royalty to offer wry commentary in her books on the paradoxes and absurdities of the entertainment industry.
Star Wars, released in 1977, turned her overnight into an international movie star. The film, written and directed by George Lucas, traveled around the world, breaking box-office records. It proved to be the first installment of a blockbuster series whose vivid, even preposterous characters became pop culture legends and the progenitors of a merchandizing bonanza.
Fisher established Princess Leia as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of the dreaded Darth Vader or the romantic interests of the roguish smuggler Han Solo.
She reprised the role in three more films—The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Return of the Jedi in 1983 and, 32 years later, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general.
Lucasfilm said on Tuesday Fisher had completed her work in an as-yet-untitled eighth episode of the main Star Wars saga, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017.
Offscreen, Fisher was open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She channeled her struggles with depression and substance abuse into fiercely comic works, including the semiautobiographical novel Postcards From the Edge and the memoir and one-woman show Wishful Drinking.
Carrie Frances Fisher was born on October 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, California. She was the first child of her highly visible parents (they later had a son, Todd).
Any semblance of a normal childhood was impossible for Fisher. At 15, she played a debutante in the Broadway musical Irene, which starred her mother, and appeared in Reynolds’s Las Vegas nightclub act. At 17, Fisher made her first movie, Shampoo (1975), Hal Ashby’s satire of Nixon-era politics and the libidinous Los Angeles culture of the time, in which she played the precocious daughter of a wealthy woman (Lee Grant) having an affair with a promiscuous hairdresser (Warren Beatty).
She partied with the Rolling Stones during the making of The Empire Strikes Back, hosted Saturday Night Live and had romantic relationships with Dan Aykroyd (with whom she appeared in The Blues Brothers) and Paul Simon. She and Simon had a marriage that lasted less than a year.
In The Princess Diarist, she admitted what many fans had long suspected: During the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had an affair.
Her survivors include her mother; her brother, Todd; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with the talent agent Bryan Lourd; and her half sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.