FILE - In this Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 file photo, actress and writer Carrie Fisher appears on the NBC "Today" television program in New York to discuss "Wishful Drinking," her autobiographical solo show on Broadway. On Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016, a publicist said Fisher has died at the age of 60. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
NEW YORK — No one could make us laugh through the pain like Carrie Fisher.
The daughter of Hollywood stars Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and a survivor of early fame, drug addiction and bipolar disorder, she wrote with unsentimental wit and understanding about her private struggles and about an industry she was raised in but stood apart from.
Fisher, known to the world as Princess Leia of “Star Wars,” died Tuesday at 60, four days after falling ill aboard an airline flight. Media reports said the actress had suffered a heart attack.
“I do believe you’re only as sick as your secrets. If that’s true, I’m just really healthy,” she said in a confessional 2009 interview with The Associated Press.
The public fell in love with her twice: as Princess Leia and as the wry truth-teller of such books as “Postcards From the Edge,” “Wishful Drinking” and “The Princess Diarist,” in which she revealed having an intense affair with “Star Wars” co-star Harrison Ford.
Fisher told plenty of secrets about others — about her parents’ breakup when she was 2, about being advised by Warren Beatty on wearing a bra in “Shampoo,” and about arguing with then-husband Paul Simon about whether it was better to be a man or a woman.
Asked by NPR recently why she wrote about her fling with Ford, who was 15 years older and married, she joked that she could hold back no longer because he had refused to die: “I kept calling and saying, ‘When are you going to die because I want to tell the story?’”
But she was toughest on herself and unafraid to turn trauma into humor. She became the most knowable of celebrities, with a great and generous gift for bringing us into her unusual life.
“One of the therapists came in to admit me and asked how long I had been a drug addict,” she wrote in Postcards,” her autobiographical novel that became a movie of the same name. “I said I didn’t think I was a drug addict because I didn’t take any one drug. ‘Then you’re a drugs addict,’ she said. She asked if I had deliberately tried to kill myself. I was insulted by the question. I guess when you find yourself having overdosed, it’s a good indicator that your life isn’t working.”
She is survived by her mother; her daughter, Billie Lourd, from a relationship with talent agent Bryan Lourd; her brother, the actor-filmmaker Todd Fisher; and her half-sisters, actresses Joely and Tricia Leigh Fisher. Her father died in 2010.
Born and raised in Beverly Hills, Carrie Fisher was a bookish child who had difficult relationships with both parents. In a celebrity breakup that made headlines everywhere in 1958, Eddie Fisher left his family for Elizabeth Taylor.
Eddie Fisher was hardly present for his daughter in her early years, and Reynolds’ second husband, shoe store magnate Harry Karl, was even worse. He squandered his own money and Reynolds’ on gambling and prostitutes and left the actress and her children broke and devastated.
Carrie Fisher went into the family business early — too early, she would later say. She was performing on stage by age 12 and appeared with Reynolds in the 1973 Broadway revival “Irene.” She was still a teenager when she made her feature film debut in “Shampoo” in 1975.
Even after “Star Wars,” Fisher would speak often of feeling overshadowed by her mother and about the need to break away, a conflict dramatized in “Postcards From the Edge.”
Mother and daughter were estranged for years but reconciled later in life and came to admire each other’s talent and determination. “Bright Lights: Starring Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher,” an HBO documentary, is scheduled for release in 2017.