Today would have been Carrie Fisher’s 61st birthday, had she not passed away at the end of 2016. To celebrate her life, I thought I’d round up some of the amazing stories, speeches, anecdotes, and interviews we’ve published from and about her over the years. From her role as a Star Wars heroine to her mental health advocacy, from her fiery responses to sexism to her amazing writing, Carrie Fisher represented a whole lotta much-needed goodness to a whole lotta people. She provided a model of opinionated, complicated, imperfect, and uncompromising womanhood for a lot of us who needed to see that in the world – and given the state of things today, we miss her voice more than ever.
- She once hand-delivered a cow tongue to a predatory Hollywood producer who’d tried to sexually assault one of her mentees.
- She gave zero fucks about the people who tried to body-shame her for her appearance in The Force Awakens. “My body is my brain bag,” she tweeted. When Good Morning America tried to ask her about her weight, she hilariously turned around the “stupid conversation” and then shifted the attention to her dog Gary.
- She roasted Donald Trump on Twitter.
- Asked how parents should explain “slave Leia” to their children, she said, “Tell them that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage.”
- In addition to her more famous role as Leia, she was also an amazingly prolific and talented script doctor. She worked on Hook, Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, and more.
- As one of the writers on the Last Jedi script, she insisted that Leia’s character arc live up to her legacy. “She was so conscious of the place that Leia had,” said director Rian Johnson, “not just broadly in the culture, but very specifically in terms of girls who grew up watching Star Wars, when Leia was the only female hero on the screen. She really wanted to do right by that, drawing the character forward.”
- She would glitter-bomb fans who came to meet her, and she worked tirelessly and fiercely to end the stigma around mental health – with both unapologetic advocacy and self-deprecating humor. Her urn was even shaped like a Prozac pill.
- When George Lucas received an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, she gave this super-snarky speech where she joked about him “ruining my life” by casting her in Star Wars.
- Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she joked, “They want to hire part of me, not all of me. They want to hire about three-fourths, so I have to get rid of the fourth somehow. The fourth can’t be with me.”
- In this speech at the Harvard Humanist Hub, she freely shared her experiences with agnosticism, mental health, body image, fandom, and therapy.
Please feel free to share your own favorite Carrie Fisher stories in the comments.
(Featured image via Lucasfilm and Walt Disney Studios)
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