Some actors are going to be remembered for one role and one role alone, regardless of the rest of their oeuvre. In someways it is an unfortunate outcome of the vagaries of fame, but for somebody who was famous since the day they were born, Carrie Fisher took that upon herself with great grace and humour.
For Gen-X at least, Carrie Fisher was royalty, thanks to her part in 'Star Wars', playing Princess Leia. Way back when the film first arrived, she appeared to us as a sassy, feisty woman who could roll with the boys in the action scenes. It was a very 1970s kind of new feminine, and a generation of boys grew up thinking that was what they liked. Like most boys who identified with Luke Skywalker and his adventures, I always thought of her as kind of like an older sister I never had, doing her thing across the galaxy.
The Carrie Fisher we know outside of 'Star Wars' was somebody with a tremendous sense of humour, influenced by Dorothy Parker's writing. She was briefly in films such as 'When Harry Met Sally', and occasionally did interviews where she would tartly joke she would not date somebody younger because she "didn't want to give them the satisfaction of being able to say they fucked Princess Leia". As long time fans of Star Wars movies, we kind of understood implicitly the funniness of that remark. After all, we owed her and her character an incalculable debt.
Fischer wrote books about her extraordinary life, one of which turned into the film 'Postcards from the Edge'. Her sense of humour was absurdist as well as full of well-observed insight about the foibles of people, as if she couldn't quite believe people were getting off so much on the 'Star Wars' franchise. She was open about her drug use as well as her affairs at various times in her life. The remarks she made were often self-deprecating but devastatingly funny. Her account of her audition for 'Star Wars' that was excerpted from 'The Princess Diarist' is humorous as it is brutally frank about the nature of the film business.
Carrie Fisher is also one of those people who could recognise themselves in songs written about them, namely by Paul Simon, with whom she had a long relationship. She made jokes about her promiscuity in her youth, warning Daisy Ridley not to go to bed with the entire cast and crew as she had done, "going through them like wild fire", and joked that for the 'The Force Awakens', 'they' made her lose weight because they only wanted 3/4ths of her and "may the fourth be without" her.
In the era of the internet, she had a humorous sparring partner in William Shatner - another actor who will be remembered for one role alone - where they would banter and joke about her metallic gold bikini from 'Return of the Jedi'; the legendary bikini of which was apparently a source of much erotic stimulation of a younger generation of Star Wars fans. Fisher said her favourite moment in the entire saga was when Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hutt, strangling him with the chain that kept her tied in her metallic gold bikini.
It is spooky to recall how in spruiking her recent book she was asked why she was coming forward with some of the details in it now, and she remarked that the present was opportune merely because she might not be able to do it in the future, either through old age memory loss, worse still dementia, incapacitation, or death. Thus it is that 'The Princess Diarist' will become her parting gift to her fans, a little like David Bowie's 'Dark Star'.
Heart attack at 60 is awfully, terribly young in this day and age. Vale Carrie Fisher, you were an inspiration to us all. May the Force eternally be with you.
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