Carrie Fisher dies at 60
Carrie Fisher has died, four days after suffering a cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles. My guess is that the damage was just too huge, both to brain and body, and further life support maintenance was not advised.
A sad event. Fisher was only sixty, which sounds young to me.
I was never a Star Wars fan—or paid all that much attention to Fisher, actually. But I know a lot of people really loved her. My sense of her was that she was a much better writer and wit than she was an actress. Sarcastic and funny, she was entertaining on talk shows and in her books, which were laced with biting and sometimes self-deprecating humor (I read this one long ago).
Fisher wrote candidly about her history of substance abuse. She was later diagnosed as being bipolar, which is an illness whose sufferers often are quite creative and also often turn to substances in a vain attempt to even out their wildly swinging moods. I would guess (although I doubt we’ll ever know) that this history may have contributed years later to her heart problems.
Fisher had enjoyed a renascence of sorts in recent years with her new roles and later Star Wars movies, and a new book. She was on a book promotion tour when she was felled by the cardiac arrest.
RIP.
So sad…. I just saw Rogue One yesterday, and a young Princess Leia was CGI’d into it. Wonderful movie, BTW. Captured the original feel quite well.
I took the Princess as a role model in my youth since she was such a bad ass.
I’ve never seen any of the Star Wars movies, so I have no nostalgia or attachment to her in that role. When all of those kiddie movie franchises got started in the late 1970s, it only took one glance for me to know they weren’t for me.
But much later on, when the novel Postcards From the Edge came out, Carrie Fisher was much lauded and I remember seeing her on David Letterman while he praised her wit and writing talent to the skies. Which bothered me a little, because at that time I was represented by a big literary agency and had been told, with some amusement, how another client of the agency had ghost-written that book. Fisher had been in rehab for addiction to Percodan, and as part of her treatment was required to keep a daily journal. Every patient did. When she was released, she related a few of the anecdotes she’d written down to her friends, got some laughs, and someone suggested her notes could be turned into a book.
Enter the ghost. Hollywood.
Never a BIG Star Wars fan, although I certainly enjoyed the first couple of movies.
However, I have watched some of the videos clip of Carrie doing the daytime TV rounds to helped push her latest book and the latest Star Wars movie; She not only came across as charming; but, as someone having a blast doing it!
Having read her books and seeing what she went though (although, she is witty about her illness) it was good to see her enjoying happiness.
And, yes, 60 IS young!
I met Debbie Reynolds briefly in about 1972. She was a wonderfully vivacious and gracious woman. She was on a flight that I was the co-pilot on from LAX to LAS and came up to the cockpit to talk to the hired help. (Those were the days when passengers could still come up to the cockpit and chat up the crew.) She made us all laugh and feel good about meeting a star like her.
My heart goes out to her. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. May she be comforted by her memories of Carrie and their relationship. Deepest condolences to Debby.
RIP Carrie Fisher.
I loved her books, especially Postcards From The Edge. She had a disarming honesty about herself and her limitations. I for one will miss her.
I wonder if there will be an autopsy ? The flight was 11 hours, I wonder about deep vein thrombosis, (blood clot that travels to the lungs). Seems a heart attack would have had some warning signs, while she was running around in the UK, chest pains, atypical fatigue, nausea. Too young to go, very sad for family left behind, however illicit drugs are notorious for damaging the cardiovascular system.
J.J,
Yes, mourning the lose of a child is a burden I never want to experience. When our daughter, the first born, was battling breast cancer, we were struggling to face the idea she would die before us. We (she) dodged that bullet when she reached 5 years cancer free.
mollynh:
It’s not even clear that Fisher had a heart attack at all. She had a cardiac arrest. A cardiac arrest can result from a heart attack, or it can have other causes. It is often caused by a fatal arrhythmia which in turn can have a number of possible causes besides heart attack.
I love the movie, “When Harry Met Sally” and she was perfect for her role in that. She was an attractive woman, but her face appeared altered by plastic surgery in the last couple years. (Not sure of the time frame, I don’t follow Entertainment media.) There are few woman, IMHO, that benefit from altering their face as they age. Patty Duke stands out as someone who aged gracefully without the surgeries. I’ve said prayers for her family…an especially hard time of year to lose a loved one.
The illicit drug use she freely admits to might well be the source of the permanent damage to her heart’s conduction system setting her up for a potential fatal arrhythmia.
Parker – Congratulations.
It’s interesting that in my youth, 60 wasn’t so young to pass away. You’d hope for longer, but you didn’t assume you had another 20-30 years to go.