Carrie Fisher, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movie franchise, died Tuesday. She was 60.
John Deering cartoon from Wednesday's newspaper
A family spokesman, Simon Halls, said Fisher died at 8:55 a.m. She had a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday and had been hospitalized in Los Angeles.
Fisher, the daughter of pop singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, went on to use her perch among Hollywood royalty to offer wry commentary in her books on the paradoxes and absurdities of the entertainment industry.
Star Wars, released in 1977, turned her overnight into an international movie star. The film, written and directed by George Lucas, traveled around the world, breaking box-office records. It proved to be the first installment of a blockbuster series whose vivid, even preposterous characters became pop culture legends and the progenitors of a merchandising bonanza.
[PHOTOS: Carrie Fisher through the years]
"Carrie was one of a kind ... brilliant, original. Funny and emotionally fearless. She lived her life, bravely," Harrison Ford, a Star Wars co-star, said in a statement.
Fisher is best remembered as the headstrong Princess Leia, her hair styled in futuristic braided buns. Fisher established the princess as a damsel who could very much deal with her own distress, whether facing down the villainy of Darth Vader or the romantic interests of smuggler Han Solo, played by Ford.
She reprised the role in three more films -- The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Return of the Jedi in 1983 and, 32 years later, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, by which time Leia had become a hard-bitten general.
On Tuesday, Lucasfilm said Fisher had completed her work in an as-yet-untitled eighth episode of the main Star Wars saga, which is scheduled to be released in December 2017.
"She was extremely smart; a talented actress, writer and comedienne with a very colorful personality that everyone loved," Lucas said in a statement.
"In Star Wars she was our great and powerful princess -- feisty, wise and full of hope in a role that was more difficult than most people might think."
Off-screen, Fisher was open about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She channeled her struggles with depression and substance abuse into fiercely comic works, including the semiautobiographical novel "Postcards From the Edge" and the memoir and one-woman show "Wishful Drinking."
"I'm a product of Hollywood inbreeding. When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result," she said in the show. At another point, she cracked: "I don't have a problem with drugs so much as I have a problem with sobriety."
Carrie Frances Fisher was born on Oct. 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was the first child of her highly visible parents (they later had a son, Todd).
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Any semblance of a normal childhood was impossible for Fisher. At 15, she played a debutante in the Broadway musical Irene, which starred her mother, and appeared in Reynolds' Las Vegas nightclub act. At 17, Fisher made her first movie, Shampoo (1975), Hal Ashby's satire of Nixon-era politics and the libidinous Los Angeles culture of the time, in which she played the precocious daughter of a wealthy woman (Lee Grant) having an affair with a promiscuous hairdresser (Warren Beatty).
She partied with the Rolling Stones during the making of The Empire Strikes Back, hosted Saturday Night Live and had romantic relationships with Dan Aykroyd (with whom she appeared in The Blues Brothers) and Paul Simon. Her marriage to Simon lasted less than a year.
In The Princess Diarist, she admitted what many fans had long suspected: During the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had an affair.
In a 2009 interview with The Associated Press, Fisher wasn't coy about revealing details about her life. She hoped to remove the stigma from mental illness.
"People relate to aspects of my stories and that's nice for me because then I'm not all alone with it," she said. "Also, I do believe you're only as sick as your secrets. If that's true, I'm just really healthy."
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, Joey Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, the daughters of Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens.
Information for this article was contributed by Sandy Cohen, Lindsey Bahr and Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press.
A Section on 12/28/2016