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Carrie Fisher



Carrie Frances Fisher (Burbank, October 21, 1956 – Los Angeles, December 27, 2016) was an American actress, stand-up comedian, screenwriter and writer. She was born in Burbank, California, the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. Todd Fisher is her younger brother. Her half-sisters are the actresses Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, daughters of her father's third wife, Connie Stevens. When she was only two years old, her parents divorced her and her father married Elizabeth Taylor. Carrie Fisher grew up wanting to follow in her famous parents' footsteps. She began to get noticed by staying with her mother in Las Vegas at the age of 12. She attended Beverly Hills High School, but dropped out at age 15 to become an actress. She later enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she remained for 18 months, and Sarah Lawrence College, which left to film the Star Wars saga. In 1977 she played the character of Princess Leia in George Lucas' science fiction classic Star Wars, starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness. She reprized her role as Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and in the final film of the trilogy Return of the Jedi (1983). The Star Wars saga was a global success that made it famous throughout the world. Princess Leia became a merchandising triumph in the United States: Kenner produced several action figures, widely available in toy stores, portraying Carrie Fisher as the character in multiple versions. She often joked that it wasn't her who became famous, but Princess Leia, who happened to resemble Carrie. In the late 1970s she fell into drug abuse. She played Princess Leia again in the 1978 TV movie The Star Wars Holiday Special, where her acting performances were ruined by an apparent drug addiction. The problem became of such importance that she was almost fired outright during the filming of The Blues Brothers (1980) because her drug and alcohol abuse left her unable to complete a single scene. Having become aware of the situation, she decided to seek treatment and signed up for Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. She was diagnosed with bipolar mood disorder at age 24, but she was unable to accept the diagnosis until she overdosed at age 28. She finally accepted the disease in 1987 after a nervous breakdown. In 1989 she made her mark in When Harry Met Sally..., in the role of Marie, and had a brief appearance in the role of a psychiatrist in the first film of the Austin Powers series. In 2009 he staged Wishful Drinking, a theatrical show in which, with a style halfway between cabaret and confession, he retraced the years of his life, talking about his family affairs, his bipolar disorder and the difficult relationship with the character of the Princess Leila. In 2013 she was appointed member of the Jury of the 2013 Venice Film Festival, chaired by Bernardo Bertolucci. In 2015 she reprized the role of Leia Organa in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J. J. Abrams and in the sequel Star Wars: The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson, and released posthumously in 2017. She appears one last time in 2019 in the last chapter of the Star Wars saga: The Rise of Skywalker still directed by J.J. Abrams thanks to sequences previously shot and deleted for Episode VII. On December 23, 2016, during a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles, she suffered a heart attack that caused cardiac arrest 15 minutes after landing. Once on the ground, she was admitted to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where doctors were able to stabilize her condition. Although she showed signs of improvement, she died on December 27, aged 60. The following day, while organizing her funeral, her mother Debbie Reynolds suffered a stroke which caused her death a few hours later in hospital. Her last words were: "I just want to be with Carrie."



Autograph Type: Black and white photo