Carrie’s crazy life laid bare

Daughter of Hollywood royalty, bipolar former drug addict and Princess-freaking-Leia, Carrie Fisher’s had the sort of life you couldn’t make up if you tried.

It’s a tumultuous 53 years she details in her one-woman Broadway show, Wishful Drinking, which she brings to Australia this month.

Fisher said that writing the show — and the memoir of the same name — was a difficult process, given the memory loss she suffers as a side effect of the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) she underwent several years ago as a successful treatment for her bipolar disorder.

“There are about four months of my life I’ll never get back, and it’s affected my vocabulary. Occasionally I’ll search for a certain word and just come up against a wall,” Fisher told Sydney Star Observer down the line from her Los Angeles home.

“But really, I have as good a memory as anyone my age who took a lot of LSD. I say it’s either because of ECT, LSD or AGE. I think I should call my next book ‘Before I Forget’. ”

Fisher lays her life bare in Wishful Drinking, from her intimidating beginnings (as the daughter of crooner Eddie Fisher, who died in September aged 82, and actress Debbie Reynolds), to her downward spiral through rehab stints and mental illness.

“I find if you claim stuff, it has a lot less power over you. I spent a lot of years being ashamed of being manic depressive, bipolar, having been left for a man, but once they became funny to me, the difficulty ended.”
Surely you need some distance, in order to find the tragic hilarious?

“You do, but I’ve learned how to make things funny faster. Although when I went into rehab, it was funny right away. We were all the village idiots — a community of failed junkies. That became funny, because it’s tragic otherwise, and who has time for that?”

Although she’s enjoyed a career as a successful author (Postcards From the Edge) and actor (including a recent show-stealing appearance on 30 Rock), Fisher’s name will forever be synonymous with one role: Star Wars’ Princess Leia.

“George Lucas made my career, and he’s made it so that when I die, they’ll show a picture of Princess Leia with two dates underneath. I’m honoured,” she said, although she admitted she still encountered some odd fans.

“Sometimes they sob. One guy said, ‘I thought about you every day from when I was 12 to when I was 22. Actually, four times a day.’ That’s disgusting!”

As a twenty-something damsel in distress, she may have been fodder for every straight boy’s spank-bank, but throughout the rest of her career, Fisher’s been embraced as something of a gay icon.

She said it was easy to understand why.

“I had my first three kisses with gay men, my child is with a gay man, most of my life is very gay-identified. I have made out with one girl, and though it was pleasant, it wasn’t really my thing. But I’m very much a gay buddy.”

info: Wishful Drinking plays at the State Theatre on October 19 and 20. Visit www.wishfuldrinking.com.au

CAPT:
Hollywood royalty Carrie Fisher has turned her personal setbacks into an entertaining night of theatre.