Carrie Fisher: a missive

It's probably fair to say that my first crush back in 1978 was on Carrie Fisher - in the form of the character she was playing in Star Wars of course, but to me the two were inseparable, and still are.

She was often very insecure and typically self-castigating about herself in the role ("it made a star of Princess Leia, and I just happened to look like her"), but what became self-evident from the later SW films was how Carrie herself brought such pugnacity to the role, that was so missing without her; when she returned to the role 22 years later in The Force Awakens, it looked a rather cosmetic Leia Organa, but Fisher the actress had lost none of her conviction.

As is well known, she has brushed with death 30 years before - her drug overdose is charted in her semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge. It brought out the other side to Carrie Fisher, that in point of fact was always there if one took the trouble to notice it. The later years for me were, to be honest, times of increasing disillusion - her revelations about "going through the crew" and of her affair with Harrison Ford make her death seem ill-timed with a slight element of distaste. But she was what she was - and a manic depressive too, it was part of her whole being and in some ways the secret of her appeal.

I met her once at an autograph signing event in 2003. She was a vision embedded somewhere under layers of mascara, in a hotel function room behind the Dominion Tottenham Court Road (the place where I first saw Star Wars, on Carrie's birthday in 1978.) She was pleasant, smiled adequately, as did I, and left it at that. I was just another geeky fan in the queue, after all.

Years before that I had written a fan letter as an aspiring actor and film maker, to which she graciously signed a photo - which I did not ask for but she sent along anyway - in reply.

I've never known Carrie personally, but I felt as if a part of me has - and in some ways I am glad of the distance between here and Beverly Hills, between her pain and fame and any of my woes. I can't possibly relate to her lifestyle or her problems, but I do feel a curious sense of symbiosis - how apt that her death should be just as much publicised as parts of her life.

The final thoughts have to be with her family - Debbie Reynolds is a survivor, not only of a scandalous break-up from her husband Eddie Fisher after his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, but also now of her - and our - brightest stardust, and Billie Lourd has now not only lost a mother but also probably her best friend.

But Carrie's (and Leia's) name and aura live eternal, certainly for long-term fans like me.

(message originally posted on Facebook)