Carrie Fisher, the daughter of two of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1950s, actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, died on December 27. She had become a celebrity in her own right. She played the heroic Princess Leia in the blockbuster 1977 film Star Wars and two sequels in the 1980s, in which was the role of a lifetime. She died at the age of 60.

She had been constantly reinventing herself by design or necessity, first as a versatile character actress and later as a best-selling writer and raconteur, telling confessional tales about her parents and her complicated life amid iTinseltown's glamour.

Often far from a spotlight or the paparazzi, Fisher had returned to the headlines in November, when she revealed in interviews and in a newly published memoir that she had an affair with co-star Harrison Ford while casting Star Wars in the 1970s.

She was on a promotion tour for her new book, The Princess Diarist, while she had suffered an apparent heart attack on December 23 on an airline flight from London to Los Angeles. She had been rushed to the UCLA medical center and put in intensive care. She died on December 27 at the hospital.

Already a celebrity from Star Wars, Fisher won a different kind of acclaim in her 30s, as she had launched an unexpected second career as an acerbic, self-lacerating chronicler of Hollywood excess or "what it's like to live an all-too-exciting life for all too long."

In her first book, Postcards From the Edge, Fisher wrote of life inside drug-rehabilitation clinics, of bedroom couplings and uncouplings and especially about the doubts, fears and resentments of a daughter who always seemed to stand in the shadow of her glamorous mother. It was the best-selling semi-autobiographical novel of 1987

The opening line of the book has been considered as a nutshell summary of Fisher's problems and humor, "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway."

By Prakriti Neogi