Carrie Fisher Has Survived It All

Global fame as Princess Leia, drugs, alcohol, mental illness, rehab…this actress and writer has survived it all. And now, with the much-anticipated release of a new Star Wars film, she's back.

- Michelle Davies

WHEN CARRIE FISHER WAS 13, her mother suggested they smoke pot together. ‘She came to me and said, “Dear, I thought that instead of you smoking where you might get caught and get into trouble, you and I might experiment”,’ Carrie has revealed. It was the summer of 1969, and the family was holidaying in their modernist Palm Springs home – taking a break from their LA mansion. Marijuana was to trigger a crippling dependency in Carrie that would plague her for decades, but of course neither of them knew that then. She didn’t take her mother up on the offer: ‘At the time I couldn’t think of anything weirder.’

Yet in the wider scope of her upbringing, it wasn’t that odd. Her mum was Singin’ In The Rain actress Debbie Reynolds and her dad, singer Eddie Fisher, had walked out when Carrie was two and her brother Todd was just six weeks old, to marry Debbie’s best friend – Elizabeth Taylor. Carrie grew up in a house with eight pink fridges, went to grown-up parties with the likes of Cary Grant, and was followed everywhere by paparazzi. She once said about celebrity children, ‘The family is organised around parents and not children. [They’re] what’s swept aside by the paparazzi, literally.’

Early on, Carrie feared she’d never live up to expectations: ‘I was ten when I realised with profound certainty that I would not be the beauty my mother was. If I wasn’t going to be pretty, maybe I could be funny or smart.’ By the time she hit her teens she wanted to be a writer, but Debbie had other ideas: she pulled her 15-year-old daughter out of high school to join the chorus of her Broadway show, Irene. By her mid-teens Carrie, who’d been experimenting by herself, had become a habitual user of marijuana. She also began having therapy, suffering from excessively dark moods.