Carrie Fisher^†

A casting tip from a friend reached her at drama school in London in December 1975. She flew home for Christmas break, read for George Lucas, and got a part Terri Nunn had been the front-runner for. Star Wars turned her into a global figure overnight, but the deal was comically bad: roughly $10,000 total, a quarter of one percent of profits. She signed away her likeness rights for free, missing decades of merchandise revenue. "The mistake was I signed away my likeness for free," she said later.

The gold bikini from Return of the Jedi became one of the most fetishized images in cinema, and she hated it. Called it "what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell." The franchise made her inescapable. It didn't make her rich.

The writing career is the part people underestimate. Postcards from the Edge won the Los Angeles Pen Award for Best First Novel, and she adapted it into a film directed by Mike Nichols with Meryl Streep, earning a BAFTA screenplay nomination. From there she became Hollywood's go-to script doctor for 15 years, polishing Hook, Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, even the Star Wars prequel scripts. Most of this work went uncredited.

The mental health advocacy sealed the legacy. Diagnosed bipolar at 24, she didn't accept it until 28 after an overdose. Her memoirs turned the wreckage into sharp prose. The Princess Diarist won a posthumous Grammy. She talked about addiction and the absurdity of fame long before it was fashionable, and she did it funny, which is harder.

Hollywood royalty is a generous term for what she grew up in. Her father Eddie Fisher left her mother Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor in 1959, creating one of the era's biggest celebrity scandals. She told Oprah in 2011: "I didn't want to be around her. I did not want to be Debbie Reynolds' daughter."

She used that dysfunction as material for everything. When a producer at Sony sexually assaulted her friend Heather Ross, she sent him a cow tongue in a Tiffany box with a note: "If you ever touch my darling Heather or any other woman again, the next delivery will be something of yours in a much smaller box." She delivered it personally and watched him open it. That story tells you more about her than any filmography does.

Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, suffered a stroke and died the following day while planning her daughter's funeral. Todd Fisher said Reynolds stated "I want to be with Carrie" shortly before she died. She was posthumously inducted into the Disney Legends program in 2017. On May 4, 2023 (Star Wars Day), she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, placed across the street from her mother's. Daughter Billie Lourd sprinkled glitter on it, saying "My mom was glitter."