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When George Lucas was casting the first Star Wars film in 1976, he had a bit of a problem. He was having trouble casting an actress as Princess Leia. She had to be young and beautiful, but tough and aristocratic. He tested pretty much every up-and-comer in Hollywood until he finally found the one actress who brought elegance (and sass) to the role: Carrie Fisher.
I know this story because like a lot of hardcore Star Wars nerds, I’ve devoured every documentary and book on the subject. Both Star Wars and Princess Leia mean a lot to me. I leaned on the original trilogy and its proud heroine to help me get through the roughest parts of my childhood. I watched the films to escape the pain I felt in the wake of my father’s death and I tried to be brave like Leia when I knew I had to stand up (or at least veer away from) the bullies who dogged my childhood and adolescence.
I have a visceral memory of trying to explain Leia’s impact on me as a teenager to other girls who simply didn’t get it. She wasn’t a wilting flower, she wasn’t there just to be the love interest, and she wasn’t just waiting for life to happen to her. Princess Leia was a fighter, a military strategist, and a spitfire. In the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, Leia doesn’t cave inwards after she is forced to witness the destruction of her entire world — she only grows stronger. When Han and Luke rescue her from certain death, she doesn’t fall over herself to thank them; she points out everything they’re doing wrong. In many ways, she is as much the hero of the original trilogy as Luke. In fact, she’s the one who drives the action that starts the whole thing by sending R2-D2 to Tatooine, calling for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help. But the big reason why Princess Leia was an important role model for me because she didn’t worry about being liked so much as she cared about being good and brave and bold. I believe that Leia’s spine of fire came from Fisher’s own personality.
Circling back to those legendary Star Wars auditions…instead of treating Leia like a fresh-faced damsel-in-distress, Fisher’s Princess had the smooth confidence of a 1930s dame. I’ve heard more than one person attribute this attitude to the fact that Fisher was literal Hollywood royalty, but really this verve came from somewhere deep inside the writer and actress.
Carrie Fisher was way more than Princess Leia, but Leia was all that she was because of Carrie Fisher. In addition to being an iconic fantasy heroine, Fisher was a brilliant comic actress, incredible writer, and iconoclast. She was a script doctor on everything from Sister Act to The Wedding Singer. She dated Dan Aykroyd at the height of his stardom, married and divorced Paul Simon (inspiring his songs), and, yes, had that torrid set affair with Harrison Ford. She was an inspiration.
In her later life, Fisher became an outspoken advocate for mental health issues. She spoke out about her own struggles with addiction and bipolar disorder, mining her own trauma for such works as Postcards from the Edge and her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking. She took her pain and made insightful comedy from it, illustrating a deep understanding that the only way to battle the darkness is to expose it to light. Her candor and courage helped take away the stigma from mental illness. This past year, Harvard College awarded her its Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism because her “outspokenness about addiction, mental illness, and agnosticism have advanced public discourse on these issues with creativity and empathy.” Though it may sound silly, just last week, I was on a TSA line at Newark Airport and a man was going through security with his mental health dog. Someone made a snide comment about it not being a real service dog and I wanted to scream, “Emotional service dogs are real things! Carrie Fisher took her dog Gary with her on the entire The Force Awakens press tour to help calm her down! And it worked!” (My point there being that Fisher’s openness about her own struggles and her solutions for overcoming them has helped to normalize mental health treatments in everyday life.)
Fisher’s legacy should be one of strength and courage, wit and ribaldry, but most of all, it should be one of hope. Rather than succumb to her addictions, she took them straight on and pushed them into public discourse. Rather than to submit to norms, she carved out a powerful place for herself in Hollywood as an influential screenwriter and storyteller. And rather than play Princess Leia like just another pretty sidekick, she imbued the character — and the saga — with grace and steel.
Right now, the first ever standalone Star Wars film, Rogue One, is number one at the box office. It’s a bleak film that ends in what would seem to be utter disaster. However, in the final moments, we see a (slightly ghoulish) CGI recreation of a young Carrie Fisher, holding the Death Star plans, explaining we still have hope. That’s when the audience knows that it will all be okay — a new generation of fighters are about to stand up to evil and they will defeat it. It may not feel that way right now for us in the real world, but Fisher’s death doesn’t have to be a complete waste. By remembering her spirit and her courage, we too can find the heroes and heroines in ourselves and we too can lead the fight against pain, mental illness, and addiction in our day-to-day lives.
