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Carrie Fisher dies aged 60

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Carrie Fisher, who shot to fame as Princess Leia in the Star Wars films died on Tuesday aged 60, her daughter said through a family spokesman.

“It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning,” Lourd said in a statement.

“She was loved by the world, and she will be missed profoundly.” Fisher’s friend and former Star Wars co-star Mark Hamill said in a tweet: “No words. #Devastated”

William Shatner said: “A wonderful talent & light has been extinguished.”

Fisher, the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, who died in 2010, had been in England shooting the third season of the British sitcom “Catastrophe.”

Fisher suffered a heart attack during a flight on Friday from London to Los Angeles. She was met by paramedics and rushed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

Her mother posted on Facebook


Her death came a month after the actress and author made headlines by disclosing that she had a three-month love affair with her “Star Wars” co-star Harrison Ford 40 years ago.

Fisher revealed the secret in her memoir The Princess Diarist — based on Fisher’s diaries from her time on the first Star Wars movie.

Fisher said the affair started and ended in 1976 during production on what would become one of the biggest and most influential movies of all time.

Ford played the maverick Han Solo.

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars (1977)
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars (1977)PHOTO: LUCASFILM

“It was so intense,” Fisher told People. “It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend.”

She was 19 and Ford was 33 at the time of the affair.

“How could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? I was so inexperienced, but I trusted something about him. He was kind,” she wrote of Ford in the memoir, the latest of several books Fisher authored over the years.

Fisher reprised the role in two “Star Wars” sequels and even gained sex symbol status in 1983’s Return of the Jedi when her character wore a metal bikini while enslaved by Jabba the Hutt.

Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Return Of The Jedi (1983)
Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Return Of The Jedi (1983)PHOTO: LUCASFILM



She returned to the  franchise in 2015's The Force Awakens.

Filming was completed in July on Fisher’s next appearance as Leia in Star Wars: Episode VIII, which will be out in December 2017.

Shortly after news of her death was made public, her dog Gary, who has his own Twitter account, said goodbye: “Saddest tweets to tweet. Mommy is gone. I love you @carrieffisher.”

EARLY SHOWBIZ START

Born in Beverly Hills, Carrie Fisher got her showbiz start at age 12 in her mother’s Las Vegas nightclub act. She made her film debut as a teenager in the 1975 comedy Shampoo, two years before her Star Wars breakthrough.

But her life was also mired at times in substance abuse, mental illness and tumultuous romances with other entertainment figures, all of which he laid bare in her books, interviews and a one-woman stage show titled Wishful Drinking.

She was once engaged to comic actor Dan Aykroyd, later married, then divorced, singer-songwriter Paul Simon, and had a daughter out of wedlock with Hollywood talent agent Brian Lourd.

After undergoing treatment in the mid-1980s for cocaine addition, she wrote the bestselling novel, Postcards from the Edge, about a drug-abusing actress forced to move back in with her mother.

She later adapted the book into a film that starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

It was her work ion this film that led to another career as a screenwriter and script doctor, being brought in to improve many big name movies. 

Entertainment Weekly described her as "one of the most sought after doctors in town."

Films as diverse as Steven Spielberg's Hook, the Whoopie Goldberg vehicle Sister Act, action movie Lethal Weapon 3  and Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer.

Add to that, she also worked on all three Star Wars prequels.

In an interview with WebMD, primarily about her experience with bipolar disorder she was asked as a script doctor, "what does it take to heal bad dialogue?".

Her reply: "Make the women smarter and the love scenes better."

She admitted in a 2011 interview with Reuters that tabloid exposure of her private life could be trying.

“’Carrie Fisher’s tragic life.’ That was one that hurt,” she said, quoting a headline. “’Hey, how about Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John.’ That hurt.”

She also acknowledged being briefly hospitalised in 2013 due to a bout with bipolar disorder.

Summing up the showbiz legacy she expected to leave behind in her 2011 memoir “Shockaholic,” Fisher wrote in self-deprecating style: “What you’ll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.”

Source: Reuters, WebMD, Entertainment Weekly

 

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