RIP Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia)

[shotgunneeley]

The following are some excerpts from "The Making of STAR WARS" by J. W. Rinzler (2007). Thought they'd be a nice way to show both her personal as well as professional sides during the original film. I remember watching the entire trilogy on VHS during the late 1990s for the first time while home from school sick as a dog. The galaxy brought to life by her and the rest of the cast made everything better.

Pg. 103-104

The daughter of Hollywood icons Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Carrie Fischer was attending the Central School of Speech and Drama in London when she was first contacted in early December. "Carrie Fisher was a social friend of mine," Fred Roos says. "George was about to cast another actress, but I kept urging him to meet Carrie and test her."

"They called me in London to test with the first block of girls," says Fisher, who had recently played a minor but notorious role in Shampoo (1975). "They wanted me to come home, but you can't leave that school in the middle because it's like doing a play, and we were just into final production." Fisher took a rain check. "I thought I'd totally missed testing for it."

Circumstances favored Fisher, however, and she was contacted again while at home in Los Angeles during her Christmas break. Like Hamill, she received her pages in advance. "Leia was unconscious a lot," she says. "And I wanted to be unconscious; I have an affinity for unconsciousness. I thought I could play that very well. But I also wanted to be involved in all of it, with Wookiees, with the monsters in the cantina. I was caught by my mother and some of my family rehearsing in my underwear. I would come out of the bathroom and say, 'General Kenobi!' My family thought I was crazy, because the dialogue was, 'A battle station with enough firepower to destroy an entire system.'"

Her designated scene was the one in which Leia reveals the importance of what R2-D2 is carrying. "When we finally tested Carrie, we had the opportunity to soften her a little bit because she wore her hair pulled back straight and was dressed rather severely," Crittenden says. "We added some makeup and had her wear something that was a little more feminine and younger looking. Carrie was very unique in that she was formidable for an eighteen-year-old. She had a tremendous amount of sophistication, so in fact the hardest thing to do was to get her to be young."

"It was like they were doing an assembly line," remembers Fisher, who had been told by Brian de Palma that Jodie Foster had the inside track. "That day I think they had ten or fifteen people. They had me do it a couple of different ways: conversational and then arch. They taped a rehearsal and they taped another one, and there was very little direction - and I thought There is no way that I have it. I didn't hear anything for about three weeks, so I thought, Well, I'm not going to get to have lunch with monsters."

pg. 125

The last lead to be cast was Leia. "I had another girl who was much younger, who looked like what you might envision as a princess [Terri Nunn]," Lucas says. "She was very pretty and petite, but she also had an edge to her. Whereas Carrie is a very warm person; she's a fun-loving, goofy kid who can also play a very hard, sophisticated, tough leader. This other girl couldn't play sweet and goofy. Whereas with Carrie, if she played a tough person, somehow underneath it you knew that she really had a warm heart. So I cast it that way. The princess is one of the main characters, so the actress was going to have to be able to generate a lot of strength very quickly with limited resources available - and I thought Carrie could do it."

"I ran outside in excitement," says Fisher, "because I'd seen American Graffiti three time sand liked it a lot."

pg. 169

April 20 was Carrie Fisher's first costume fitting, at Berman's, the actress having arrived the previous day. Before leaving the United States, she had been worried about her hair and her wardrobe. "One of the costume sketches had me wearing a little Peter Pan leotard," Fisher says. "But it was rejected. I was also scared about what they were going to do to my hair, because I had so much hair put on me, two different sessions of that - I had at least thirty hairdos tried on me. And they didn't like it when I got to London. When I arrived, they were shooting the Mos Eisley thing. The hairdresser woman Pat [McDermott] put on me what she had as an idea for the hair - and that was it. I went into the cantina and showed George the hair, and he said, 'That's okay.' Then they put me in a nice white dress and put dirt all over it. And from the first day on, they put a gun in my hand with charges in it, took me to a sound stage, and had me practice shooting it."

"For Leia's costume, what we did was to slit it up the side in a bit so she could move around," Mollo says. "We had special boots made for her, too. Jean Harlow was the type, so we looked through a few Vogues and came up with that slightly different belt."

pg. 176

While Tuesday's filming was uneventful, Wednesday, April 28, featured Luke and Leia's swing across the chasm. Though the stage floor was only about a dozen feet below - a matte painting would be added much later to simulate the bottomless pit - harness expert Eric Dunning had been called in on April 21 for an evening meeting with department heads to discuss logistics and safety.

"First they practiced with two puppets on one string dangling from the roof just to see if the rope was strong enough," Fisher says. "Then they put all these cardboard boxes down on the ground, but I couldn't see how the boxes were going to prevent me from breaking any bones. After kissing Mark, George wanted me to say, 'For luck,' which sounded obscene because the words blended into one another. Then I was supposed to shoot the gun and swing. On the swing across, I was going to hold the gun, which is real heavy, and that scared me because I thought I'd drop it. I was also afraid my hair was going to fall off. But it was funny that day - everyone was laughing - and we only had to do it once."

pg. 177

Fisher's first appreciable dialogue occurred with Peter Cushing in the Death Star control room the following Thursday. It was here that she started to understand how Lucas worked with his actors. "Up until the scene with Peter Cushing, I was just running down corridors, and George didn't talk that much to me," Fisher says. "But in my scene with Peter, I was doing too sarcastic and George wanted real anger. But I liked Peter Cushing so much that, in my mind, I had to substitute somebody else in order to get the hatred for him. I had to say, 'I recognized your foul stench...' But the man smelled like linen and lavender."

pg. 186

"Carrie is the funniest girl I ever met," Hamill says. "She makes me laugh, almost always, and she has a great sense of humor about herself. She doesn't take herself seriously, which would probably be very easy for her to do. I actually didn't know how the Princess was going to be. I did the whole hologram scene before I even met her. So Carrie comes in and she's like Carole Lombard: beautiful to look at, but with a sense of humor."

pg. 209

To protect themselves from the slimy water in which the tentacle lay, the actors had the option of wearing a wet suit under their clothes. Fisher, however, thought it was mandatory and soldiered through the two days. "I liked jumping through the garbage chute, but I didn't like wearing the wet suit," she says. "It was under my white gown, for protection - or I was going to look like Walter Brennan [a leathery and wizened actor] from the waist down from being in the water so long."

pg. 210

On Monday, June 28, Ford flew to Los Angeles, along with Fisher, who was taking a break. And it was another last day, this time for Peter Mayhew. The Princess and the Wookiee had enjoyed some good times together. "We'd go to lunch at the Chinese restaurant, and I'd have my 'hairy earphones' on, and Pete Mayhew is seven foot two," Fisher says, "but they'd serve us like we were regular people. That was my favorite part. I'd go out to get cigarettes and magazines in my entire outfit, and ... nothing. They would just give them to me."

pg. 212

Carrie Fisher returned to this melee on Sunday, July 4, bearing a gift for the beleaguered Lucas. "Carrie brought him a Buck Rogers helium pistol," Hamill says. "and George wouldn't put the thing down. We saw him in the hallways up at EMI, just kinda twirling it around. Couldn't pry it out of him."

Pg. 193

The scheduling of the award ceremony couldn't have been better. The actors had really gotten to know one another by this time, and their camaraderie spilled over and into the scene, with Fisher's infectious humor and smile mirrored by Ford and Hamill - and caught forever on film.

[Maverick]

Don't really have much of any consideration for actors and entertainers in general. I enjoy their work but find them less important than say, janitorial staff. Not trying to be insulting, that's just my opinion.

In this case I am sorry that the family has suffered the loss of two members. I would not wish that on anyone. RIP to them both, Mother and Daughter.

[PR3D4TOR]

In happier times.

[Karnak]

Don't really have much of any consideration for actors and entertainers in general. I enjoy their work but find them less important than say, janitorial staff. Not trying to be insulting, that's just my opinion.

How very Japanese of you.

[Rich46yo]

Don't really have much of any consideration for actors and entertainers in general. I enjoy their work but find them less important than say, janitorial staff. Not trying to be insulting, that's just my opinion.

In this case I am sorry that the family has suffered the loss of two members. I would not wish that on anyone. RIP to them both, Mother and Daughter.

I'll pass on the mourning stage as well.

[icepac]

For such a petite girl, she had the voice and mannerisms of a true boss.