5 Carrie Fisher Roles That Showed She Was More Than Princess Leia
Carrie Fisher would have turned 70 this week. Here are five of our favorite roles.
'30 Rock'
You probably know her as the fearless space princess with one of sci-fi's most recognizable hairdos. But while she stole many hearts as Princess Leia in Star Wars, Carrie Fisher played several other parts, including behind the camera.
She died in 2016. On the week of her passing, Star Wars creator George Lucas said, "Carrie and I have been friends most of our adult lives. She was extremely smart; a talented actress, writer and comedienne with a very colorful personality that everyone loved. In Star Wars she was our great and powerful princess—feisty, wise, and full of hope in a role that was more difficult than most people might think" (via NBC Los Angeles).
Part of what made it difficult was the dialogue. Fisher spent the rest of her career showing that she knew how to fix lines like that.
Fisher was born Oct. 21, 1956, so in celebration of her birthday week, we thought we'd look at a few of her more grounded, less interstellar roles.
The Mystery Woman in The Blues Brothers
She's a femme fatale in the most literal sense. She shows up, looks beautiful, and pulls out a rocket launcher, immediately trying to kill the Blues Brothers.
Unnamed, she's a heavily armed, silent mystery woman, played with relish by Fisher, who is hell-bent on bringing the brothers down. The payoff comes later, when she's revealed as Jake's former fiancée, out to kill him for leaving her at the altar.
The role runs on her physical commitment. A running gag only works if the performer plays it straight every single time. For actors, the takeaway is that you can build a whole character with almost no dialogue.
"One of the most brilliant and hilarious minds of our eon, Carrie would say things like: 'I love tiny babies. When they cry, they turn red and look like screaming tomatoes,'" Aykroyd wrote in tribute for Empire (via WDRG).
Marie in When Harry Met Sally
Wild how Fisher seems to just turn up in some of the best films of every genre, in this case one of history's most beloved romantic comedies. In When Harry Met Sally, she plays Marie, best friend to Sally (Meg Ryan). She's the friend who pulls out a Rolodex at lunch to find Sally a date. We first meet Marie well into the movie, eating lunch with Sally and another friend at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park. Sally tries to set her up with Harry, but she goes for Harry's friend Jess (Bruno Kirby) instead.
Ephron wrote the lines, but Fisher made them play, and it's because everyone knows this cynical friend well, and she's fully developed on the page. A supporting character needs a point of view of her own.
"I suppose you could say Nora was my ideal," Fisher said in 2012 (via CBC). "In a world where we're told that you can't have it all, Nora consistently proved that adage wrong. A writer, director, wife, mother, chef, wit—there didn't seem to be anything she couldn't do."
Fisher admired Ephron as a writer who did everything, and within a year she was doing the same thing herself.
Screenwriter and Script Doctor
Okay, this is a role in the nontraditional sense. But did you know that Fisher was a screenwriter too, and was hired often to punch up scripts?
Postcards from the Edge was the door. Fisher adapted her own 1987 novel for Mike Nichols. According to the AFI Catalog, MGM contracted Fisher to adapt the screenplay, which focused on the relationship between Suzanne Vale and her mother, Doris Mann. The New York Times described that theme as virtually nonexistent in the novel.
She called Postcards "faction," saying it "takes fact and spins fiction into it to make it work for cinema" (via Phoenix New Times).
The Postcards script got her hired to fix other people's scripts. She was brought onto Hook to rewrite Tinkerbell's part. She told Phoenix New Times, asked if she's the best in the biz:
Not anymore, but I was for a long, long time. I adapted my last book for HBO into four, one-hour episodes that Meg Ryan is supposed to play. I’ve still done re-writes but not as much. It’s a good job, but that is a job I did not look to get. I wrote Postcards and based on that I was asked to rewrite Hook. They told me they wanted me to rewrite Tinkerbell’s part, but if Tinkerbell interacts, you’re writing scenes.
To get off of that I took another rewrite job. So it just went from Hook to whatever. Sister Act. Lethal Weapon 3. The River Wild. Some really bad ones too. I would rewrite my parts if I did little parts too. I rewrite the dialogue. That’s sort of how I got to do it. Harrison Ford was rewriting his stuff in all the Star Wars movies and it became annoying because it impacted my stuff. It is easier as an actor to go into rewriting because you know what would fit into your mouth dialogue wise. We would tell George Lucas, “You can type this shit but you can’t say it.”
An adaptation succeeds when you're willing to throw out your own source material, and a rewrite succeeds when you hear the line in an actor's mouth. Her reputation was for sharpening women's parts.
Rosemary on 30 Rock
30 Rock is a gold mine of great characters, and Rosemary is no different. Fisher guest-starred in "Rosemary's Baby" as a burned-out TV writer, a cautionary tale for Liz Lemon. The New Republic called her appearance the best example of Fisher's late-career arc as a sitcom scene-stealer, and the role earned her an Emmy nomination.
Tina Fey later said, "Carrie Fisher meant a lot to me. Like many women my age, Princess Leia occupies about sixty percent of my brain at any given time. But Carrie's honest writing and her razor-sharp wit were an even greater gift. I feel so lucky that I got to meet her. I'm very sad she is gone" (via NBC Los Angeles).
Mia on Catastrophe
She played Rob Delaney's chilly mother in Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney's Prime Video comedy Catastrophe, and received a posthumous Emmy nomination for guest actress in a comedy for the role.
In 2016, she said, "I did really want to play an awful person. There are not a lot of choices for women past 27. I don't wait by the phone" (via Entertainment Tonight).
"She brought her incredible, crazy, hilarious, warm, kind personality, but she also brought us the character of Mia," Horgan said (via Page Six). "You know, we wrote it down, but she made her the brilliant monster that she is. I miss her, but I'll miss her in our show, you know, I'll miss that character and I'll miss being able to tell that character's story."
What are your favorite Carrie Fisher roles?
