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Carrie Fisher

October 21, 1956–December 27, 2016

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Carrie Fisher until we are able to commission a full entry.

Carrie Fisher in 2013, image courtesy of Riccardo Ghilardi via Wikimedia Commons.

While Carrie Fisher was best known for her early film roles, she spent most of her career as a script doctor, shaping characters for others to play. The daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and musician Eddie Fisher, Fisher quit school at fifteen to act alongside her mother in the Broadway revival of Irene, and made her film debut in 1975 in Shampoo. In 1977 she played Princess Leia in Star Wars, a role she reprised in the 1980 and 1983 sequels. She also appeared in The Blues Brothers, When Harry Met Sally, Hannah and Her Sisters, and other films throughout the 1980s. In 1987 she published her bestselling book Postcards from the Edge, later turned into a movie, about her drug addiction and her troubled relationship with her mother. While she acted in cameo roles throughout her life, she mainly worked as a script doctor on films such as Lethal Weapon 3 and The Wedding Singer, rewriting the female characters to make them funnier and more interesting. In 2006 she debuted her one-woman show Wishful Drinking, and in 2016 she released The Princess Diarist, a memoir based on her journals from filming Star Wars. In 2015 and 2017 she came full circle, returning to the Star Wars franchise as General Leia in her final film roles.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Carrie Fisher." (Viewed on December 25, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fisher-carrie>.