When Carrie Fisher spoke to the BBC’s Nationwide programme on 6 December 1977, Star Wars had been a phenomenon in the US for more than six months. British viewers would have to wait another agonising three weeks for their first glimpse of the film, and she couldn't have sold it any better.
"It's pure entertainment – it's like a rollercoaster ride," she said.
Asked what attracted her to the role of Princess Leia Organa, she said Star Wars creator George Lucas "didn't want a damsel in distress, didn't want your stereotypical princess, you know, sort of victim, frightened, incapable of dealing with the situation without the guys.
"He wanted a fighter – he wanted someone who was independent, and that's what appealed to me about that part."
It was a role that would make Carrie Fisher one of the most famous faces on the planet. Star Wars is now so embedded in popular culture that it’s almost hard to imagine a time when it didn't exist. However, as interviewer John Stapleton notes, when she first read the script it must have seemed "a pretty bizarre kind of film". While Fisher said she thought the script was "terrific", a few leaps of imagination were needed to envisage how the film would turn out.
"They called it the most expensive low-budget film ever made," she said. "They had to plan every shot because they were going to have to devise all sorts of new things for the special effects. They only had, and I say 'only' but for special effects it’s not much, $3m. It's a $10m film."
Her brother Todd Fisher told a BBC documentary in 2024 that when he accompanied her to an early Star Wars screening, she was convinced it was a science fiction B-movie that would probably end her career. Speaking on A Life in Ten Pictures, he said: "Of course, first thing that happens, the words fly over and then the battle cruiser flies over. She was clutching my hand, squeezing my hand really hard, and I said, 'This is no B-movie'. Carrie's very famous, all of a sudden – she's a big star."
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Star Wars was such an instant blockbuster that all sorts of unlikely people were jumping on the bandwagon. While the exact origins of Star Wars day, aka May the fourth, are unclear, according to Star Wars online encyclopaedia Wookieepedia, the punning phrase "May the fourth be with you" from which it derives dates back to at least May 1979, when it was used by Britain's Conservative Party in a newspaper advert celebrating Margaret Thatcher becoming the country's prime minister. "May the Fourth be with you, Maggie. Congratulations," the copy ran.
A Tinseltown iconBorn into Hollywood royalty in 1956, Carrie Fisher was the daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and pop singer Eddie Fisher. She secured the role of Princess Leia after studying acting in London. In 2004, she told BBC Breakfast about how in the first Star Wars film she spoke with a "floating British accent that I acquired at the Central School of Speech and Drama. I'm not exactly proud of the accent or the lip gloss, but other stuff… I had a really good time".
Her acting career was dominated by her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise. When asked in 2000 on the BBC's Hardtalk programme about what the Star Wars legacy meant to her, she said: "I have no idea. My daughter carries around a folder of Princess Leia, and it follows me around for ever. Bad hair, weird clothes, no brassieres. I mean, I don't know. It would be very difficult to encapsulate what it all was." However, she did not resent being recognised in public for that role all those years later. "If I didn't like it, it would set me up for a bad life," she said.
Global fame came with personal difficulties, and Fisher – who had bipolar disorder – wrote and frequently talked about her years of drug addiction and mental illness. After the first three Star Wars films, she turned her talents to writing. In her semi-autobiographical first novel, Postcards from the Edge, she satirised her own dependence on drugs and the sometimes difficult relationship she had with her mother. It was later made into a film starring Meryl Streep. She was also in demand as a Hollywood script doctor, revising and polishing screenplays by other writers.
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Fisher reprised her role as the now General Leia Organa in the 2015 Star Wars franchise film, The Force Awakens. A year after her death in 2016 at the age of 60, she made a posthumous appearance in The Last Jedi. The credits paid tribute to her with the message, "In loving memory of our Princess, Carrie Fisher". In 2019, computer graphics were used to create her appearance in The Rise of Skywalker. Special effects have come a long way since the first Star Wars movie in 1977.
Going back to that original BBC interview, it's clear that she had already identified many of the storytelling elements that would make Star Wars such an enduring classic.
"It's good against evil – it's George's homage to every film that he ever loved," she said. "George (Lucas) loves films and what this film is about is movies. Every scene is in some way reminiscent of a scene in a film that we all loved before, like in High Noon there's a bar sequence, only this time it's with monsters instead of Gary Cooper, and you've got The Wizard of Oz where you have a robot that looks sort of like the Tin Man. You have adventure like Robin Hood, we do swing-acrosses. It could even be like Tarzan, Buck Rogers… It's got everything in it, every ingredient."
In History is a series which uses the BBC's unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.
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