“Some crappy dessert. Anything. I’ll take it all.”
That was Carrie Fisher ordering a midafternoon snack at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where she was doing interviews for “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,” a documentary about her mother, Debbie Reynolds; Fisher confided that she’d wanted to make the film for the past few years because, as she explained, “my mother had been sort of declining, and I didn’t know how much longer she would be performing.”
In a cruel, cosmic twist Fisher herself would no doubt appreciate with her distinctive brand of gallows humor, she wound up going first — ahead of the mother whose multiple gifts (singer-dancer-actress) and marriage to Eddie Fisher catapulted Carrie into fame that never seemed to fit her entirely comfortably.
She went into the family business as an actress, vaulting from off-screen Hollywood royalty to the on-screen version as a generation’s most revered space princess, along the way picking up and dropping a drug habit, turning it all into fodder for one of the finest, funniest show business memoirs ever written, albeit in the form of a semiautobiographical novel. Movie fans may consider “Postcards From the Edge” a piquant Meryl Streep comedy, but writers worship the book for the same tough, wry self-awareness Fisher brought to her script-doctoring work (including uncredited improvements to the dialogue in “The Empire Strikes Back” and other “Star Wars” sequels), her one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking,” and her actual memoir, the just-published “The Princess Diarist.”
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 lie detector and a lethally barbed verbal arsenal with which to enforce it.
