Approaching the nearly deserted hotel dining room where Fisher was holding court at Cannes, a certain amount of anxiety was in order. She was, after all, a bona fide icon whose contribution to “Star Wars” and its mythic status cannot be overstated, if only because her version of a princess was so subversively, sarcastically salty. She was also whip-smart, armed with a well-attuned b.s. detector and a lethally barbed verbal arsenal with which to enforce it.
Happily enough, Carrie Fisher turned out to be, not an Important Figure or Towering Intellect but, of all things, a person — whose mix of forthrightness and humor were on full, disarming display as she nibbled at a plate of petits fours and shared a dish of vanilla ice cream with her beloved French bulldog, Gary. (The two had been the hit of the red carpet at the White House correspondents’ dinner just a few weeks earlier. “He’s changed,” she said of the attention. “It’s gone straight to his tail.”). Although she looked terrific — if exhausted — she didn’t hesitate to share the mortification of confronting her aging face and body on a 30-foot screen, in both “Bright Lights” and, a few months earlier, in “The Force Awakens.” “I see it and I suffer, and then I see it again, and I’m sort of able to watch it,” she said, admitting that it was never easy to watch herself on the big screen, “but now it’s just ridiculous.” Last week, after seeing her 1977 “Star Wars” persona briefly come back to life in the new spinoff “Rogue One,” she tweeted, “cgi me . . . like uber-Botox only more persistent,” spelled by way of her own private language of emoji hieroglyphics.
Back at Cannes, even within the necessary confines of a rushed 20-minute interview, Fisher displayed what made her so distinctive as an actress and a writer: her honesty. No sooner had she ordered her “crappy dessert” than she launched into a monologue about how ice cream and peanut butter help manage bouts of depression. Although she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder more than a decade ago, “I don’t get depressed that much,” she confided, adding that “I think it’s important not to look for those things. So I don’t.”
Fisher eagerly recounted how she advocated for electroconvulsive therapy after having been helped by the treatment. “It has such a bad rap,” she said, “because it’s used as a technique of torture in every Hollywood movie in which it’s ever been depicted. There’s no shame in it, but there is shame in it. And part of me, I guess, likes to be sort of shocking.”
Fisher will be duly remembered for her wit, her intelligence, her acerbic self-awareness and her status as a pop-culture legend in one of the most pivotal films of the late 20th century (and beyond). But it’s her willingness to bring lucid, sometimes lacerating candor to even her most private struggles that will be her most meaningful legacy. “The great thing about it is when a 14-year-old comes up and says, ‘I found out I was bipolar, and my mom told me that Princess Leia is bipolar as well,’ ” Fisher said, adding that “anyone who has this illness is heroic.”
Leave it to Fisher to have embodied that principle literally, figuratively and, now, forever more.
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