Carrie Fisher 1956-2016
Carrie Fisher was an icon of screen, stage, and page. She starred in movies, made appearances on so many TV shows we’ve loved, and provided voices for animated characters. She made audiences laugh with her stage show, and had us all enraptured with her autobiographical books. She even made movies better without being in them–she was well known in Hollywood circles as being the best script doctor out there.
Script doctors are the people who get called when a movie’s dialogue or structure just isn’t working out, and they have crazy impossible deadlines to fix them. Most films fixed by script doctors never include the last-minute genuises in the credits, but Fisher was known in the industry to have fixed quite a few scripts in the ’90s, and who knows how many more.
Her autobiographical book, Wishful Drinking, was adapted into a stage performance by Fisher as well as an HBO special. It’s a funny, poignant, and bravely honest book about her life, her struggles with addiction and mental health.
She was best known by us 80s kids as Princess Leia in Star Wars, where she showed little girls everywhere that you can be both a princess *and* a blaster toting badass.
One of the saddest goodbyes to her online appeared on Twitter, on the account of Gary, her pug:
I think tonight is a good night for some Carrie Fisher movies.
More PCB:
Carrie was giving love and advice to her new neighbo(u)rs, the British
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.