Carrie Fisher bares all, metaphorically speaking, in her autobiographical one-woman show, Wishful Drinking.
A long time ago (Oct. 21, 1956), in a galaxy far, far away (Burbank, Calif.), Carrie Fisher, the once and future Princess Leia Organa, was born to pop crooner Eddie Fisher and Singin’ in the Rain starlet Debbie Reynolds. Fisher dumped Reynolds (and his baby daughter) a couple years later for Reynolds’ former BFF, Elizabeth Taylor. But it was George Lucas, the bearded, pompadoured, perennially plaid-clad creator of Star Wars, whom Fisher credits with ruining her life. (And here we thought all he’d ruined was the Star Wars franchise, which at least was his to fuck up.) When the 19-year-old Fisher beat out comers like Jodie Foster and Terri Garr for her role in Lucas’s seminal space opera in 1976, she recalls that her friends ribbed her that the movie’s goofy title “sounded like a fight between between my parents.”
Despite that avuncular beard, Lucas was not a kindly mentor (like Obi-Wan Kenobi), but instead kind of a dick (like Grand Moff Tarkin). He wouldn’t let her wear a bra, explaining matter-of-factly that “there’s no underwear in space.” (That didn’t stop him from dressing her in chainmail lingerie for Return of the Jedi in 1983, kicking off my sexual awakening a decade or so ahead of schedule.) Fisher weighed a decidedly un-Hutt-like 105 lbs. when Lucas cast her; he told her to drop ten. Hollywood is a cesspool of bantha poodoo, no? Dude actually owns Fisher’s likeness, too, so, sez Fisher, “when I look in the mirror, I have to send him a couple of bucks.” But even after all that, she doesn’t hold a grudge.
Except for the hair.
The hair, says Fisher in Wishful Drinking, the glib and hilarious oral autobiography she debuted in 2006 and is performing at the Lincoln Theatre this month, is the one indignity she cannot forgive. The entire show is about her sharing her pain, but without giving too much away, she shares this particular embarrassment rather directly with one lucky or unlucky member of the audience.
