The Rebel Princess

That’s one of the surprising revelations of Carrie Fisher: a Life in Ten Pictures, which the BBC is showing this week and to which I contribute as a film journalist and loudly enthusiastic Princess Leia fan. It’s the second run of a documentary series that previously covered stars such as Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon. The show chronicles their extraordinary lives through photos of ten key moments, chosen to illustrate how these giant personalities made their impact.

Fisher may not seem like an obvious choice given that line-up. She never climbed to the top of Hollywood’s A-list and split her time between film, writing and a much-publicised battle with addiction and mental health. But as myself and the other people interviewed for the series argue, she had a bigger impact than you might imagine.

Perhaps that should be no surprise: Fisher was born to stardom. Her mother was the adorable Debbie Reynolds, America’s sweetheart and the star of Singin’ in the Rain. Her father, Eddie Fisher, was a successful singer who became notorious after he left Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was just two years old.

It created an unstable home life for the youngster, despite her close relationship with her brother Todd and (usually) with her bustling, energetic mother. As the bookish girl got older she saw her mum struggle to hold on to her career when Hollywood deemed her “too old” for movies, and developed a life-long wariness of fame.

Despite that, she went into the family business with an early role opposite Warren Beatty in Shampoo. Two years later, in 1977, while she was still a teenager, she became Princess Leia, the “damsel in distress” rescued by Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, in a minor kids film that no one seems to have expected much from. Yet George Lucas’s Star Wars (as it was then) became the highest grossing film of its time – helped by Fisher’s performance as the strong-willed freedom fighter who drove the plot forward.

Perhaps Lucas liked the idea of casting Hollywood royalty as his space princess, but Fisher’s audition showed she could easily convey the startling self-confidence the role required (“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” she greets her would-be rescuer). It was, of course, a pose. Fisher’s journals from the time show that she was riddled with insecurities, worried by the studio mandate that she lose weight for the role and convinced it would all come to nothing. It can’t have helped that, according to Fisher, Lucas told her there was “no underwear in space” when she asked about her costume’s brassiere, or that he would later suggest a skimpy gold bikini for the third film.

Her response to feeling desperately young and out of place on the mostly male set was to employ her trademark wit to cover it up. That’s how she “won the man lottery” as she described it in her book The Princess Diarist, by striking up an affair with her older co-star Harrison Ford, who assumed she was as cool as she seemed. She spent their three-month dalliance feeling conscious of her own failure to measure up to his cool, taciturn sophistication. When it fizzled out what was left was a strange sense of ease between them that helped with their on-screen dynamic, just like the brotherly friendship she struck up with on-screen brother, Hamill.

The film’s record-breaking, world-changing impact led to two near-immediate sequels, but it was a change that the young Fisher struggled with. At that time she was beginning to suffer visibly from what would eventually be diagnosed, at the age of 24, as bipolar disorder.

Fisher hadn’t understood why her moods were so uncontrollable, and used drink and drugs to try to manage them by herself. Even after her diagnosis, it would take four more years and endless struggles to get her substance abuse under control for any length of time. But, hyper-verbal as ever, she spoke openly about her experiences and helped to demolish the stigma around bipolar disorders. “I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital,” she told ABC in 2000. “I am mentally ill… I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving that.” It was a hugely important admission. If Princess Leia was dealing with it, fellow sufferers knew they had a leader.

Fisher had other great movie roles, though you have a sense she took them as favours for friends rather than pursuing work. She plays an eye-catching cameo as a would-be murderess in The Blues Brothers, opposite her sometime-fiancé Dan Aykroyd and on-screen love interest John Belushi, and steals scenes and some of the best lines in When Harry Met Sally. But after publishing her first, semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge in 1987, to great acclaim, she spent more and more of her time as a writer. That was adapted into a hit film, with Meryl Streep in the (sort of) Fisher role and Shirley MacLaine in the (sort of) Debbie Reynolds part. It was followed by memoirs like Wishful Drinking and The Princess Journals, and more novels, including Delusions of Grandma. She also worked as a Hollywood script doctor, sharpening the humour in films from Lethal Weapon 3 to The Wedding Singer and even writing jokes for the Oscars ceremony each year.

In the 2010s, with a return to the screen in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Leia became a General, older and wiser but still ferociously devoted to her cause. It was a victory lap for Fisher, who seemed to have found some sort of peace at last: a devoted mother to her actress daughter Billie Lourd and to an ever-present dog sidekick called Gary Fisher; a scene-stealing regular on comedy series Catastrophe; an uninhibited star who said the things that others feared (she once threatened with castration a producer who had sexually harassed a friend) and a successful mental health advocate and author. That made it all the more tragic when she had a heart attack on a flight from London to LA and died four days later on 27 December 2016. Her mother died of a stroke the next day.

In the end, Fisher’s legacy rests less on her film credits than her sheer force of personality. She spoke out about the ridiculousness of stardom, about sexism and ageism in Hollywood, and all the ways that fame is a two-edged sword. Her criticisms of stardom came, as it were, from inside the house, from a position of generational understanding. But her work mattered, too. People listened to her, at least in part, because she was also Leia, the princess and rebel leader who has inspired generations of fans now.

“Movies are dreams,” Fisher once told Rolling Stone. “You can portray a woman who’s a master and get through all the female prejudice if you add a magical quality, if you’re dealing in fairy-tale terms. People need these bigger-than-life projections.” As someone larger than life herself, Fisher was well placed to know.

Carrie Fisher: a Life in Ten Pictures Thursday 9.00pm BBC2

Helen O’Hara’s book Women vs Hollywood: the Fall and Rise of Women in Film (Robinson) is available now