Introduction
You often wonder what happens behind the polished facade of global pop culture phenomena. When you watch cinematic masterpieces, you seldom see vulnerable teenagers struggling beneath heavy costumes and sudden spotlights.
Carrie Fisher looks back at her unexpected journey filming the first Star Wars movie at age nineteen, revealing the secret affair, the burden of early fame, and the strange reality of living as Princess Leia.
You explore this turbulent journey through several distinct stages. The book examines early resistance to Hollywood glamour, the rigorous reality of unexpected casting, a hidden romance on set, and the lifelong burden of celebrity.
You might ask several key questions as you read:
- How did a nineteen-year-old actor cope with sudden global fame?
- What was the reality behind the scenes of the original film?
- How does an early iconic role shape your identity forever?
1. Life Before Leia
Growing up with famous parents who experienced declining careers instilled a deep early aversion to show business in the author.
You observe the fickle nature of Hollywood through the career trajectories of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Debbie Reynolds transitioned from MGM blockbusters to Las Vegas nightlife after her contract expired in her late thirties. Eddie Fisher suffered a career decline due to drug addiction and personal scandals, earning the title America's Cad.
Debbie Reynolds starred in What's the Matter with Helen? at age forty. At age twelve, the author sat on her grandmother Maxine's lap. Maxine expressed active disappointment upon realizing Debbie Reynolds could no longer easily secure tickets to the sold-out Broadway show Annie.
Show Business Parents
You learn early that fame is unstable and fading celebrity brings bitterness. The author developed a strong resistance to show business as a result of these family dynamics.
Early Auditions
Securing a role in the film Shampoo at age seventeen introduced the author to professional film sets through an unconventional process. Warren Beatty and Robert Towne cast her to play the promiscuous, angry daughter Lorna. The author participated in scenes requiring improvisation with food and physical appearance decisions made directly by the star.
Warren Beatty inspected the author's braless chest on set before deciding whether she should wear a bra under her tennis outfit. She shot only two scenes for the production, which she sometimes mentally labeled LubeTube.
Director Terrence Malick conducted conversational auditions designed to test whether actors were comfortable in their own skin. Instead of traditional readings, Malick spent over an hour talking and listening to personal anecdotes, utilizing interviews as psychological preparation for improvisational filmmaking.
The author shared eccentric personal stories during her meetings with Terry Malick, including tales about a gay secretary named Lynn and dancing with a performer named Albert when she was age fifteen.
2. Casting and Production
Securing the role of Princess Leia required rigorous casting, strict physical demands, and meticulous daily hair transformations.
The Star Wars Auditions
The casting process for Star Wars brought together untested young actors through rigorous read-throughs managed by George Lucas and Brian De Palma. You might find yourself auditioning concurrently for Brian De Palma's horror film Carrie and George Lucas's space fantasy. You would later return to read the script with Miguel Ferrer before a final reading with Harrison Ford.
Upon being notified by your agent that you got the part of Princess Leia, you ran out into an extremely rare Los Angeles rainstorm in pure disbelief. You entered what the author terms Lucasland, navigating a target age range for casting calls of eighteen to twenty-two.
The Buns of Navarone
Securing the role of Princess Leia came with a strict physical demand to lose weight, leading you to visit an eccentric Texas fat farm. Cast members were expected to meet specific physical standards, prompting a nineteen-year-old actor to undergo a grueling regimen at a wellness retreat.
While at the Texas fat farm, you met advice columnist Ann Landers and Lady Bird Johnson, who mistakenly thought Star Wars was titled Car Wash. You were asked to lose ten pounds from your original weight of 110 pounds during a week-long stay.
The iconic Princess Leia hairstyle required hours of daily meticulous styling using hairpieces bolted and wound into oversized buns. Hairdresser Pat McDermott spent two hours every morning transforming you through an elaborate routine before filming could commence at Borehamwood Elstree Studios.
Your daily routine involved these specific elements:
- a five a.m. morning call time on set;
- a forty-five minute travel time from Kensington to Borehamwood Elstree Studios;
- a two-hour duration required to style the Leia hairpieces known as the buns of Navarone;
- a typical evening wrap time of six thirty p.m.
After cycling through alternative hairstyle sketches ranging from Russian princesses to Swedish maids, the team settled on the famous hairy-earphone configuration. You learned to navigate this hair don't while working on the fill-um.
George Lucas provided rare, direct feedback on character motivation when actors attempted to interpret archaic dialogue too casually. When confronting antagonist Peter Cushing as Governor Tarkin, you initially wanted to deliver lines with sardonic irony. George Lucas stepped in to emphasize the extreme gravity of losing an entire planet.
George Lucas pulled you aside to explain that because Leia's home planet was about to be destroyed, your emotional delivery needed to reflect absolute devastation rather than casual sarcasm. You frequently heard directions like faster and more intense, knowing that minor continuity errors would be handled in post.
3. The Secret Affair
A secret three-month affair with Harrison Ford during filming became a defining and heavily guarded chapter of the author's youth.
Carrie Fisher kept the affair secret for forty years. Harrison Ford was married at the time and fourteen years older than her. The relationship began after a birthday party for George Lucas.
The Carrison Affair
At George Lucas's thirty-second birthday party at Elstree Studios, crew members tried to get Leia legless by pushing her to drink wine instead of her usual amaretto. When crew members joked about abducting Fisher, Harrison Ford pulled her into his studio car and took her back to London.
Fisher was initially reluctant to have an affair with a married man due to her childhood trauma. Her father, Eddie Fisher, left her mother, Debbie Reynolds, for Elizabeth Taylor when Fisher was an 18-month-old infant, creating her lifelong aversion to playing the home wrecker.
At the North Star Pub in St. John's Wood, Fisher performed an imitation of Harrison Ford's disenchanted swagger, which broke his scowling demeanor and made him laugh. You see how this moment won his genuine laughter and approval.
Lost Diaries
Fisher found three notebooks she kept during Episode IV while expanding her bedroom and searching through storage boxes beneath her floorboards. The diaries served to calm her chaotic thoughts and process the intense secrecy surrounding her relationship with Ford.
Fisher notes that for three months, marijuana stripped away her certainty and replaced it with intense paranoia, obliterating her memory of the affair's details. She did not use drugs other than Ford's pot on weekends during the first film.
On a fourteen-hour coach flight back to Los Angeles, Harrison Ford told Fisher she had the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai. You recognize that this parting compliment allowed her to close the chapter without regret.
4. The Burden of Celebrity
Playing Princess Leia completely eclipsed the author's personal identity while subjecting her to the strange demands of fan culture and conventions.
Before Star Wars, you experienced fame only as a by-product of your famous parents or later spouses rather than through your own achievements. Having watched the slow decline of her parents' celebrity, Carrie Fisher understood the fleeting nature of fame. She recognized that the massive wave of popularity belonged to Princess Leia rather than to Carrie Fisher herself.
Neither the studio nor the cast anticipated that the film would become a massive cultural phenomenon. The project was treated as a small, low-budget production, with actors flying economy and living on modest per diems.
Fisher describes driving past the Avco Cinema on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood and seeing massive lines wrapped around the block to buy movie tickets for five bucks.
A lack of financial foresight in her youth left Fisher vulnerable when a business manager eventually drained her funds. When Fisher signed on for her first lead role at age nineteen, holding out for merchandising points or a percentage of the gross did not occur to her. In her early twenties she had money and told her handlers to handle the numbers while she cavorted and shopped.
Two decades after the first film, Fisher found herself out of money with a heavily mortgaged house, leading her to write travel pieces and make personal appearances at Disneyland.
Celebrity Lap Dance
Signing autographs for money at fan conventions functions as a higher form of prostitution that Fisher terms a celebrity lap dance. Fisher equates the financial exchange of signing pictures and meeting fans to stripping away the distance created by film or stage. Though it initially felt like selling out and caused shame, mounting bills and a depleted bank account forced her to redefine dignity to include these convention appearances.
When approached by Ben Stevens with Official Pix around the turn of the millennium, Fisher initially reacted with distaste before accepting convention signings.
Fans treat Star Wars and its characters as an extension of their families, projecting deep personal meaning onto the actors. The Oxford English Dictionary derives fan from fanatic, meaning excessive enthusiasm. Fans invest tiny pieces of their souls into celebrities, viewing them with one-sided familiarity.
A weeping fan at a convention shared how Star Wars helped her survive after her mother passed away when the first movie was released.
Identity and the Role
Playing Princess Leia completely eclipsed Fisher's personal identity, making her both resentful of and deeply protective of the character. Fisher spent the lion's share of her life from age nineteen onward being as much Princess Leia as herself. She struggled with being mistaken for the character, defending her, and being asked endless questions about her.
Fisher recalls fans shouting Princess in airports as if it were her actual legal name, requiring her to turn around and respond.
Being viewed as a sex symbol for wearing the metal bikini created an unspoken contract that fans expect actors to maintain physically. Fisher notes that aging and changing physical appearance sometimes bring disappointment or resentment from fans who wanted her to remain frozen in their youthful memories.
Fisher describes signing pictures of her nude-ass or in the slave bikini, realizing her body was judged by aging standards she could not outrun.
10 Key Ideas
- Growing up with famous parents whose careers declined instilled in Carrie Fisher a deep early aversion to show business.
- An unconventional audition process for the film Shampoo introduced the seventeen-year-old actor to professional film sets.
- Securing the role of Princess Leia required rigorous casting, strict physical demands, and meticulous daily hair transformations.
- George Lucas stepped in during filming to explain that Leia's emotional delivery needed to reflect absolute devastation rather than casual sarcasm.
- A secret three-month affair with Harrison Ford during filming became a defining and heavily guarded chapter of the author's youth.
- For three months, marijuana stripped away Carrie Fisher's certainty and replaced it with intense paranoia, obliterating her memory of the affair's details.
- A lack of financial foresight in her youth left Fisher vulnerable when a business manager eventually drained her funds.
- Signing autographs for money at fan conventions functions as a higher form of prostitution that Fisher terms a celebrity lap dance.
- Fans treat Star Wars and its characters as an extension of their families, projecting deep personal meaning onto the actors.
- Playing Princess Leia completely eclipsed Fisher's personal identity, making her both resentful of and deeply protective of the character.