LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — Carrie Fisher, an actress and actress best known to millions of science fiction fans around the world as Princess Leia from the Star Wars movie franchise, died on Tuesday. She was 60.
A family spokesman, Simon Halls, said Ms. Fisher died at 8:55 a.m., the New York Times reported. While a cause of death was not announced, Fisher had suffered a heart attack while flying from London to Los Angeles and had been hospitalized since.
The daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, Fisher was born into the show business world. She had her first break on the big screen playing opposite Warren Beatty in Hal Ashby’s 1975 comedy Shampoo, but it wasn't until 1977's her role as Princess Leia in George Lucas's "Star Wars" that she became a household name. She would go on to appear in two sequels to the film — 1980's The Empire Strikes back and 1983's Return of the Jedi. More recently, she reprised her role as the indomitable princess in 2015's Star Wars reboot The Force Awakens and was slated to appear in subsequent films in the series.
Other film roles for Fisher included The Blues Brothers, The Man With One Red Shoe, The 'Burbs, When Harry Met Sally…, Wonderland and Stateside.
Througout her life, Fisher was candid about her struggles with bi-polar disorder and her drug use, admitting to opioid and cocaine use and suffering a near-fatal overdose in 1985 while acting in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Her experiences with mental illness and drug abuse became a central theme of her caustic, comic semi-autobiographical novel “Postcards From the Edge.” The book was later made into a 1990 film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley Maclaine.
Following the success of Postcards, she penned several more semi-autobiographical novels, including Surrender the Pink (1990), Delusions of Grandma (1993), and the Best Awful There Is (2004) as well as several non-fiction books, including Wishful Drinking (2008), Shockaholic (2011), and the Princess Diarist (2016).
Her survivors include her mother; her brother, Todd; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with the talent agent Bryan Lourd; and her half sisters, Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens. – Staff Writers
