A Look Back At Carrie Fisher’s Impact As Princess Leia And Beyond
Image Source: StarWars.com
It is a great understatement to say that we were devastated when Carrie Fisher passed away in 2016. It felt like a piece of our heart was missing, and that the Star Wars universe would never be the same. She taught us many life lessons not only as Princess Leia but also in real life as well. In honor of what would be Carrie Fisher’s 66th birthday, let’s look back at her influence and impact as Princess Leia and beyond.
Born into Hollywood royalty, Carrie Frances Fisher was born on October 21st, 1956 to stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. You could call her a nepotism baby, but that would be doing a disservice to her work. Sure, her first television roles were with her mother on television, but she snagged her first big screen role in Shampoo when she was 17. Her next movie, however, would change everything.
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Her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope would go on to redefine the standard damsel-in-distress characters that we knew. She showed that women could take charge, rescue themselves, and if they wanted to, fall in love with a scruffy-looking nerf herder. Princess Leia taught us so many things without it ever being her intention.
Image Source: Medium
Because of the popularity of her character and the fact that so many people resonated with the role, a documentary called Looking for Leia was released in 2019. Female and non-binary fans were interviewed about how they found purpose, identity, and connection through Princess Leia and the galaxy far, far away. You would be hard-pressed to find another female character who has had a documentary made about the impact their character had.
When she returned to the franchise for the sequel trilogy, the princess was now a general. We got to see Leia as an older and wiser woman who was still just as resilient as ever. But there was also a softness to her, which could be attributed to wisdom, motherhood, or both. Seeing her as a general was an absolute pleasure because we see that women could be all of the stereotypical things society wants us to be and still lead an army, and head a resistance. She mirrored this in her only child, actress Billie Lourd. She took all of the lessons learned from having Debbie Reynolds as her mother and used them to be a different mother to Billie. With generational trauma being a huge mental health issue these days, it is refreshing to see a parent make an active effort to break the cycle.
In The Last Jedi, Rey asked for Leia’s blessing to leave the Resistance base to search for the Sith wayfinder. Leia’s advice not only spoke to her but also resonated with the audience, “Never be afraid of who you are.” While that advice was meant to help Rey embrace her Force powers even if she feared them, it also told us to face our fears head-on.
Image Source: Annlyel Online
When it came to mental illness and addiction, Fisher was completely open and honest about her struggles. In her memoir Wishful Drinking, she talked about her use of acid, and how her mother Debbie Reynolds called actor Cary Grant to speak with her and stage a Hollywood-style intervention. She went to rehab numerous times for her addictions, including cocaine, Percodan, and alcohol, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although she ignored it the first time she was told. Once she was diagnosed a second time, she realized that she could no longer blame it on her Hollywood upbringing and decided to take full responsibility and get treatment.
She also spoke candidly about her past with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in another one of her memoirs, Shockaholic. Although a controversial treatment method, she advocated for it as her bipolar and depression symptoms were so severe. Towards the end of her life, she had an emotional support animal, a French bulldog named Gary, who accompanied her everywhere even on red carpet premieres like The Force Awakens.
Image Source: TIME
While she did not have the same level of success as her co-star Harrison Ford after the original Star Wars trilogy, she became well-known throughout Hollywood as a script doctor, helping rework scripts for Sister Act, Anastasia, and The Wedding Singer. She also wrote several novels and memoirs, including Postcards from the Edge, Surrender the Pink, Hollywood Moms, and The Princess Diarist. Her novels were always loosely based on her real life, and Postcards from the Edge was turned into a movie (with the script written by Fisher) starring Meryl Streep and Shirley McLaine. She took her life, reworked it, and made it into an alternate reality that still showed who she was, even with all her struggles.
If there is anything that we can take from Carrie Fisher’s life and her role as Princess Leia, it is that we are resilient, we are vulnerable, and we must never be afraid of who we are. Her blasé attitude towards life (especially near the end) was refreshing. It really put into perspective that life’s too short not to find humor in every situation. In fact, her ashes are stored in an urn in the shape of a Prozac pill. Her dark sense of humor carried on past her death.
Image Source: The Hollywood Reporter
We miss you down here, Space Princess.
Image Source: Lindsay Van Ekelenburg
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Source(s): ABC News, Independent, Looking For Leia, Allure, Forbes, New York Times, E online, Inverse
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