Carrie Fisher battled sexism and addiction to become a sci-fi icon in Star Wars – so why did she turn her back on fame?
Carrie Fisher: a Life in Ten Pictures
Thursday 9.00pm BBC2
It wasn’t a normal hairstyle for 1977. The young Carrie Fisher described her Star Wars hairdo as “cinnamon buns” and said she looked “as if all I needed was a dirndl, a goat and clogs to be ready to take my place in The Sound of Music”. But from that hairstyle, actually inspired by rebel Mexican women of the early 20th century, was born a legendary character, and Fisher’s own career was launched.
That’s one of the surprising revelations of Carrie Fisher: a Life in Ten Pictures, which the BBC is showing this week and to which I contribute as a film journalist and loudly enthusiastic Princess Leia fan. It’s the second run of a documentary series that previously covered stars such as Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon. The show chronicles their extraordinary lives through photos of ten key moments, chosen to illustrate how these giant personalities made their impact.
Fisher may not seem like an obvious choice given that line-up. She never climbed to the top of Hollywood’s A-list and split her time between film, writing and a much-publicised battle with addiction and mental health. But as myself and the other people interviewed for the series argue, she had a bigger impact than you might imagine.
Perhaps that should be no surprise: Fisher was born to stardom. Her mother was the adorable Debbie Reynolds, America’s sweetheart and the star of Singin’ in the Rain. Her father, Eddie Fisher, was a successful singer who became notorious after he left Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was just two years old.
It created an unstable home life for the youngster, despite her close relationship with her brother Todd and (usually) with her bustling, energetic mother. As the bookish girl got older she saw her mum struggle to hold on to her career when Hollywood deemed her “too old” for movies, and developed a life-long wariness of fame.
Despite that, she went into the family business with an early role opposite Warren Beatty in Shampoo. Two years later, in 1977, while she was still a teenager, she became Princess Leia, the “damsel in distress” rescued by Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Harrison
Ford’s Han Solo, in a minor kids film that no one seems to have expected much from. Yet George Lucas’s Star Wars (as it was then) became the highest grossing film of its time – helped by Fisher’s performance as the strong-willed freedom fighter who drove the plot forward.
