“Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher died in a Los Angeles hospital Tuesday morning, days after suffering a massive heart attack aboard a plane. She was 60.
“Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter,” Fisher’s mom, Debbie Reynolds, 84, wrote on Facebook. “I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop. Love Carrie’s Mother.”
Fisher’s former on- and off-screen love interest, Harrison Ford, said in a statement: “Carrie was one-of-a-kind, brilliant, original. Funny and emotionally fearless. She lived her life, bravely. My thoughts are with her daughter Billie, her mother Debbie, her brother Todd and her many friends. We will all miss her.”
Her “Star Wars” co-star Mark Hamill added in a tweet, “no words #Devastated.”
The actress and author, who famously played Princess Leia in the original sci-fi trilogy, never regained consciousness after suffering a heart attack Friday while traveling from London to LA to promote her latest memoir, sources told TMZ. Fisher had gone into cardiac arrest just 15 minutes before the flight was scheduled to land in Los Angeles on Friday.
An EMT happened to be sitting in the back of the plane and rushed up to first class to administer CPR to the star, who appeared lifeless, TMZ said. It took at least 10 minutes to even get her pulse back, sources said. After the plane landed, paramedics sped her to UCLA Medical Center.
Fisher was put on a ventilator Friday evening and remained in intensive care until her death. Lourd, her only child, rushed to be by her mother’s side.
“It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning,” her family’s spokesman, Simon Halls, said in a statement.
“She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly. Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”
Fisher was most famous for her elaborately coiffed role as Princess Leia Organa.
She landed the coveted part at just age 19, beating out actresses Jodie Foster and Amy Irving.
Fisher most recently made headlines for revealing in her new book that she had an off-screen affair with married co-star Harrison Ford during the filming of the 1977 blockbuster.
“God, he was just so handsome,” Fisher dished in her new autobiography, “The Princess Diarist,” about Ford.
“No. No, more than that. He looked like he could lead the charge into battle, take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the gluten-free world, all without breaking a sweat,” she wrote.
But Fisher was less enthusiastic about famed director George Lucas and his demand that she wear Leia’s now-famous gold metal bikini in “Return of the Jedi.”
“When he showed me the outfit, I thought he was kidding,” she told NPR last month, promoting the autobiography, which was her eighth book.
“And it made me very nervous. I had to sit very straight because I couldn’t have lines on my sides, like little creases,” she said. “No creases were allowed, so I had to sit very, very rigid straight.”
Fisher had reprised her role as Leia for the latest Star Wars sequel trilogy.
“The Force Awakens’’ came out last year, and she had recently finished filming for the second flick, “Episode VIII,” due out next December.
In the four decades between her teenaged and middle-aged stints as Leia, Fisher struggled with alcoholism, pill addiction and bipolar disorder, memorably telling Oprah Winfrey in a 2011 interview that she was getting regular jolts of electroconvulsive therapy.
Her romances and friendships over those years amounted to a celebrity Who’s Who.
She married Paul Simon when she was 26, later joking that he was a short Jewish singer like her father, crooner Eddie Fisher. Both suffered from depression, and one year and one miscarriage later, they divorced, then continued to date on and off for the next decade.
In between Fisher became engaged — and then un-engaged — to comedian Dan Aykroyd.
“Where there should be a flower and a gardener, we were two flowers. In the bright sun. Wilting,” Carrie once said of her relationship with Simon.
Simon would write several song lyrics with Fisher in mind, including these from his 1986 tune “Graceland”:
She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.
Fisher bore her only child, Billie, with her second husband, Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd — who then left her after three years of marriage for another man.
Fisher was a prolific writer, plumbing her struggles as a celebrity daughter — her mom was Debbie Reynolds — sci-fi icon and against-the-odds survivor in sassy, salacious memoirs and semi-autobiographical novels.
“It isn’t all sweetness and light sabers,” she quipped of her life in her 2012 memoir “Shockaholic.”
Her 1987 roman a clef, “Postcards From the Edge,” was a critical success, later adapted into a movie by the same name and starring Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine and Dennis Quaid.
But long before she began writing — or began blasting away at Stormtroopers to the delight of generations of teenage boys — Fisher was already in the public eye as the daughter of 1950s superstars.
“I had to share her, and I didn’t like that,” Fisher told NPR last month of her movie-star mother, Reynolds, who is 84.
“When we went out, people sort of walked over me to get to her, and no, I didn’t like it,’’ Fisher said.
Her father was also a star. Her parents divorced in 1959, when Fisher was just 18 months old.
Her father had hopped into bed with a newly widowed Elizabeth Taylor and decided to stay there, creating a major Hollywood scandal.
As she grew up, her father never visited, and her mom took to drink, Fisher complained.
It was not a conventional family, even by celebrity standards, Fisher said. The year she turned 15, her mom gave her and her grandmother matching vibrators for Christmas.
“As unusual as a gift like this sounds, you have to admit that they are ideal stocking stuffers,” Fisher quipped in her tome, “Wishful Drinking.”
“Well, I have to admit, I enjoyed mine, but my grandmother refused to use hers,” Fisher said.
“She was concerned that it would short-circuit her pacemaker. She said that she had gone this long without an orgasm; she might as well go the whole way. (And that pacemaker, by the way, was later recalled.)”
Fisher started smoking pot at age 13. Over the years, she added booze and pills, all to numb her bipolar disorder, she said.
She snorted coke while shooting the first “Star Wars” sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back,” she told the Daily Mail in a 2010 interview promoting the stand-up comedy version of “Wishful Drinking.”
“I didn’t even like coke that much,” she told the Mail. “It was just a case of getting on whatever train I needed to take to get high.”
Her addiction was so out of hand that comedian John Belushi — who would OD on cocaine and speed at age 33 in 1982 — once told her to slow down.
She had recently finished filming “Star Wars: Episode VIII,” the second in the trilogy.
Earlier this year, her addiction activism was honored by Harvard College, which awarded Fisher its Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism.
Carrie Fisher’s life in pictures:
