Mother and Child Reunion

No I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away, oh little darling of mine
"Mother and Child Reunion" by Paul Simon


Of the celebrity passings last year - and there certainly seemed to be especially heavy casualties as 2016 drew to a close - none seemed more unsettling than the deaths of "Star Wars" royalty Carrie Fisher and her mother, "Singin' in the Rain" sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, within a day of each other.

On a book tour to promote her latest memoir, The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher suffered a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles. After four days in intensive care at UCLA Medical Center, she died on December 27, 2016. She was 60.

Debbie Reynolds and her son, Todd Fisher, were making funeral arrangements for Carrie at Todd's Beverly Hills home the following day when Debbie suffered a massive stroke. Reynolds had told her son, "I miss her so much, I want to be with Carrie." She died later that afternoon at Los Angeles' Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. She was 84.

Todd Fisher said his mother "didn't want to leave Carrie and did not want her to be alone." According to Todd, Debbie "loved taking care of my sister more than anything. So, she gets to do that and that's what she wanted to do."

Todd Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and Carrie Fisher are caught
off-guard in an early photograph.

Debbie Reynolds became famous near the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood and was one of the last living links to the heyday of the studio system and contract players. At 16, she won the Miss Burbank beauty contest and attracted the attention of Warner Bros. Born Mary Frances Reynolds, she was given a new first name by studio chief Jack Warner, who considered "Mary Frances" too old-fashioned. "I didn't want to be called Debbie," Reynolds recalled, "but that's the name Jack Warner gave me."

Reynolds made only one picture at Warner Bros, in a supporting role in the 1950 musical "The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady," before signing with MGM, where she had better luck. Her star-making role came in the classic 1952 musical "Singin' in the Rain." A rambunctious satire of Hollywood's transition from silents to talkies, featuring Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, the movie was a box-office hit and is still regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals ever made.

The then-18-year-old actress had no experience as a dancer, and she later said she could still recall the pain from three months of dance rehearsals that made her feet bleed. O'Connor would remember as "a great trouper." In her 1988 autobiography, Debbie, she noted, "'Singin' in the Rain' and childbirth were the hardest things I ever had to do in my life."

From 1950 to 1967, Debbie Reynolds appeared in more than 30 movie musicals and light comedies. She recorded a No. 1 hit with "Tammy," the theme song from the 1957 romantic comedy "Tammy and the Bachelor."

Leslie Nielsen, the bachelor to Debbie Reynolds' Tammy,
hones his mugging skills decades before his breakout roles
as a comedic lead in "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun."

Debbie Reynolds' sole nod for an Academy Award  with a Best Actress nomination for her larger-than-life portrait of Margaret Brown, a wealthy American socialite and philanthropist who survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, in the highly fictionalized 1964 musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" (pictured below). Reynolds personally related to a woman with unfailing resilience and a tremendous zest for life.

Actually, in MGM's 1962 Cinerama epic "How the West Was Won," which fundamentally featured every working actor under contract to the studio at the time, Reynolds anticipated her portrayal of Molly Brown in a role as a boisterous, free-spirited dance hall performer (pictured below).

The year 1966 saw Reynolds in one of her, honestly, most inane and ignominious performances, in the title role of "The Singing Nun," a sugar-coated biographical motion picture about the Belgian nun Sister Luc-Gabrielle (Jeanine Deckers) who achieved brief international fame in 1963 singing "Dominique," a French-language song about St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order.

Debbie Reynolds looks especially beatific as "The Singing Nun."

Playing like a bad TV movie and shot on cheap MGM backlots passing for Belgium, "The Singing Nun" was the last film directed by Henry Koster, a Hollywood veteran best known for discovering Abbott and Costello when the comedy duo was working at a New York City nightclub and convincing Universal Studios to sign them. Koster, who made the CinemaScope religious epic "The Robe," starring Richard Burton as the Roman soldier who wins Jesus' robe in a dice game at the Crucifixion, retired after "The Singing Nun" to pursue his lifelong passion for painting.

"The Singing Nun" was produced by John Beck, noted for two earlier achievements in cinema - as the producer of the marvelous 1950 fantasy-comedy "Harvey," starring James Stewart, and as the producer of the English language version of 1962's "King Kong vs. Godzilla," featuring a colossal ape and a fictitious dinosaur.

Mother Prioress (played by "Mrs. Miniver" Oscar winner Greer
Garson), Father Clementi (Ricardo Montalban), and Sister Cluny
(Agnes Moorehead) look on as TV host Ed Sullivan greets Sister
Ann (the name given to Reynolds' character in the movie). 

The cast of "The Singing Nun" also featured Chad Everett as a record executive and Katharine Ross (in her second motion picture) as the impoverished teenage sister of a precocious village waif.

A year after "The Singing Nun," Katharine Ross
appeared opposite Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate"
(1967), followed, in 1969, by her breakthrough role as
Etta Place in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

The real-life Singing Nun, Jeanine Deckers, was nicknamed "Sister Smile," but there was little in her life to smile about. She was unable to repeat the success and renown she enjoyed with her hit song "Dominique." Most of her earnings went to the record label and the album producer. She was, as well, increasingly in disagreement with the Catholic Church, and she left the convent the same year that "The Singing Nun" was released to pursue life as a lay Dominican.

Jeanine Deckers (top) dismissed Debbie Reynolds'
film (bottom) as "fiction."

Attempts to continue singing failed one after another, and she eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, followed by a couple years of psychotherapy. She moved in with a childhood friend named Annie Pecher, with whom she fell in love and began a lesbian relationship, although she still considered herself a nun. She still strove to revive her music career (including a synthesized disco version of "Dominique"), only to be repeatedly frustrated and disappointed. Debt, back taxes, and other financial woes ultimately drove Deckers and Pecher to commit suicide together with alcohol and an overdose of barbiturates in March 1985. Deckers was 51.

The 2009 Belgian-French production "Sister Smile," which painted a much darker portrait of Jeanine Deckers than the glossy Hollywood whitewash, starred Cecile de France (pictured above), a Belgian actress known for starring in the French horror film "High Tension" and costarring with Matt Damon in "Hereafter," directed by Clint Eastwood.

Just for shits and giggles..."The Singing Nun" was mercilessly
lampooned in "Airplane!" in the character played by pop singer
Maureen McGovern (best known for warbling the Oscar-winning
ballad "The Morning After" from "The Poseidon Adventure").

As the lighthearted fare Debbie Reynolds was noted for went out of fashion in the late 1960s in favor of heavier message movies, Reynolds migrated to the stage. She earned a Tony Award nomination for playing the title role in the musical "Irene," a 1973 revival of a Broadway chestnut from the early 1920s (pictured below).

Carrie Fisher (bottom, at Debbie Reynods' feet)
had a supporting role in "Irene."

During the 1970s, Reynolds created the nightclub act in Las Vegas that she would perform for decades.

Reynolds' Vegas act was featured prominently in Hunter S. Thompson's seminal semi-autobiographical 1972 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, when Raoul Duke (Thompson's alter ego) and his "attorney," Dr. Gonzo, get bounced from her show for causing a disturbance after conning their way in for free.

"Debbie Reynolds was yukking across the stage in a silver Afro wig," Thompson wrote, "to the tune of 'Sergeant Pepper' from the golden trumpet of Harry James. 'Jesus creeping shit!' said my attorney. 'We've wandered into a time capsule!'"

While it's true Reynolds was performing at the Desert Inn at the time represented in the book, the incident probably never happened. Debbie herself insisted she never performed "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Nonetheless, for the 1998 film adaptation of Thompson's book, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, Debbie Reynolds did record a couple lines of dialogue (heard offscreen), on the request of daughter Carrie, who was a friend of director Terry Gilliam's.

In 1971, Debbie Reynolds was cast against type in a slice of horror kitsch called "What's the Matter with Helen?" Director Curtis Harrington, who wrote and directed the 1966 cult sci-fi vampire flick "Queen of Blood," starring John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, and Dennis Hopper, was anxious to cash in on the popularity of the gothic fright films "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte." So he hired Henry Farrell, who wrote the screenplay for "Charlotte" and the original novel upon which "Baby Jane" was based, to script "Helen." 

Spoiler alert: Debbie Reynolds is ready for her closeup in "What's
the Matter with Helen?" Debbie, who produced the picture without
a screen credit, took no salary for her performance.

Set in the 1930s, "What's the Matter with Helen?" cast Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters as Midwest mothers of a pair of convicted murderers who relo to Hollywood to open a dance academy for the screen's next Shirley Temples, only to be terrorized by an unknown stalker who wants them to pay for the sins of their children. Dennis Weaver and Agnes Moorehead costarred.

Shelley Winters proved so difficult on the set of "What's the Matter
with Helen?" that the studio threatened to replace her with Geraldine
Page, who would win a Best Actress Oscar for "The Trip to Bountiful."

Along with "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," critic Roger Ebert included "What's the Matter with Helen?" in the "macabre genre of the menopausal metaphysical mystery movie," an idiosyncratic category that included director Curtis Harrington's "Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?" (1971), which also featured Shelley Winters.

Two years after the Grand Guignol theatrics of "What's the Matter with Helen?" Debbie Reynolds provided the voice of the titular barn spider in the delightful animated feature "Charlotte's Web" (1973), directed by a pair of former Disney - Hanna-Barbera animators. Henry Gibson voiced Wilbur, the nearly-slaughtered piglet, with additional voices by Paul Lynde and Agnes Moorehead. The moderately successful movie increased in popularity over the years thanks to TV and home video, and in 1994, 21 years after its premiere, became one of the best-selling video titles of the year.

The full name of Debbie Reynolds' character in "Charlotte's
Web" is Charlotte A. Cavatica (a reference to the barn
spider's scientific name "Araneus cavaticus").

After a two-decade absence, Reynolds returned to feature films with a sly cameo as Tommy Lee Jones' mother in director Oliver Stone's "Heaven & Earth" (1993) and in the title role of "Mother" (1996), starring and directed by comedic filmmaker Albert Brooks (pictured below), who wrote the script with his frequent collaborator, the late Monica Johnson. Debbie garnered rave reviews, and the comedy was Brooks' most financially successful movie as director.

People magazine said Debbie Reynolds' role in "Mother" allowed
her "to bare a steely edge beneath her famously perky exterior."

In the 2001 made-for-television film "These Old Broads," Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine, and Joan Collins portrayed former Hollywood costars whose petty jealousies logjam a reunion for a TV special planned by their mutual agent, played by Elizabeth Taylor, in her final film role. The teleplay for "These Old Broads," incidentally, was written by Carrie Fisher.

The pairing of Reynolds and Taylor in front of the camera was perhaps more than coincidence, since the two were primary players in one of Hollywood's most talked-about scandals of the 1950s. Debbie's first husband, pop singer Eddie Fisher (who married Reynolds in 1955), left the movies' girl-next-door for sultry seductress Elizabeth Taylor. Eddie and Liz were married in 1959. Turnabout is fair play, so the saying goes, and five years later, Taylor left Fisher after a torrid affair with her "Cleopatra" costar, Richard Burton, whom she married in 1964. Ironically, years earlier, Eddie and Debbie's youngest child, Todd Fisher (Carrie's kid brother), was named after Eddie's friend, producer Mike Todd ("Around the World in 80 Days"), who was Elizabeth Taylor's third husband - just before Fisher - until his untimely death in a private plane crash.

In happier times, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Debbie
Reynolds were amused in the company of Dean Martin.

Regardless of the chess game of mates, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor reconciled their friendship in the mid-1960s. Taylor admitted to Reynolds she "always regretted" hurting her.

Reynolds' last role was as Liberace's mother in the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra," featuring Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Aykroyd, and Rob Lowe, and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

In a production that glamorizes the male roles, even Dan Aykroyd(!)
"Behind the Candelabra" presents a virtually unrecognizable Debbie
Reynolds as Frances Liberace.

Behind the camera and beyond the Eddie-Liz affair, Debbie's second and third marriages left her in financial ruin. Reynolds would wryly remark, "My life has just spun along, sort of like a wheel on a car that somebody else is driving. I've just gone with it." Coincidentally, that sense of sardonic fatalism pretty much presaged the tumultuous personal life of Reynolds' daughter, Carrie Fisher.

In Carrie Fisher's autobiographical The Princess Diarist, published a month before her death, she admitted she had an "intense" three-month affair with the married Harrison Ford during the filming of "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope" in 1976. "It was Han and Leia during the week," she told People magazine, "and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend."

After meeting singer Paul Simon on the set of "Star Wars," Fisher dated him, on-again, off-again, from 1977 to 1983. In 1980, she was briefly engaged to Dan Aykroyd.

Carrie Fisher hosts a 1978 episode of "Saturday Night Live,"
featuring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as The Blues Brothers.

"We had rings, we got blood tests, the whole shot," Carrie recalled. "But then I got back together with Paul Simon." Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon were wed in August 1983 after he proposed at a New York Yankees game.

Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon were divorced in July 1984, but they continued dating afterward. From 1991 to 1994, Fisher was involved with talent agent Bryan Lourd, who eventually co-chaired Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Although they were never married, they had a daughter, actress Billie Catherine Lourd, born in 1992. The relationship ended when Bryan left her for a man.

Since 2015, Carrie Fisher's daughter, Billie
Lourd, has had a recurring role as Sadie
Swenson in the Fox series "Scream Queens."

In 2015's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," Billie Lourd portrayed resistance leader Lieutenant Connix (pictured below, with mom Carrie), a role she repeats in the upcoming "Star Wars: Episode VIII." 

Carrie Fisher was a child of the Hollywood system. In the Los Angeles Times obituary, reporter Mark Olsen remembered her as "actress, author, raconteur and chronicler of Hollywood's generational transitions." She became well known for her acerbic and openly self-deprecating wit, as well as her unflinching tendency to tell the truth.

She became an offscreen hero to many because of her openness in discussing her past with substance abuse, addiction, and bipolar disorder. "I am mentally ill," she unblinkingly declared. "I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that. I am still surviving it, but bring it on." Early in 2016, she received the Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from Harvard for her "forthright activism, outspokenness about addiction, mental illness and agnosticism" in advancing "public discourse on these issues with creativity and empathy."

In 1975, teenaged Carrie Fisher made an auspicious screen debut in "Shampoo," a slick satire of Nixon-era politics and the licentious culture of Los Angeles, featuring Warren Beatty (who produced and co-wrote the picture) as a studly Beverly Hills hairdresser. "As long as I can remember," his character says in a crystalline moment of art imitating life, "when I see pretty girl and I go after her and I make her, it's like I'm gonna live forever." Directed by Hal ("The Last Detail") Ashby from a screenplay co-written by Oscar winner Robert ("Chinatown") Towne, "Shampoo" featured Julie Christie (Beatty's costar in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "Heaven Can Wait"), Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this film.

In her first movie role ever, Carrie Fisher portrayed Lee Grant's precocious daughter  who abruptly asks Beatty, "You wanna f***?" When asked in a "20Q" interview for Playboy magazine in 1983 if she was grounded by her mother for dropping the f-bomb, Fisher replied, "No, she helped me with my dialogue and asked if I could, maybe, say screw instead of f***...My mother liked ('Shampoo'). She's not really Tammy, just as I'm not really Princess Leia...I've actually heard her say that word."

In The Princess Diarist, Fisher wryly recounted posing for Beatty with and without a bra for her role in "Shampoo," noting how he squinted at her chest "impassively." "'Let's go without,' he pronounced, directed, charged, commanded."

Warren Beatty relaxes with braless costar
Carrie Fisher on the set of "Shampoo."

When it came to her career-defining role as Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars," there was, apparently, little doubt over what to do with Carrie Fisher's bosom. George Lucas told her she couldn't wear a bra under her dress, because, he said "there's no underwear in space."

Carrie Fisher proves that actors are basically paid to wait,
between camera setups for "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope."

Not much can be said about the breakout role that permanently affixed Carrie Fisher in the galaxy of "Star Wars" icons that hasn't already been stated. As far back as 1983, when Playboy magazine asked the then-26-year-old actress if she was afraid of being known for the rest of her life as Leia, she answered, "I'm resigned to the fact that I will be, in a very pleasant way...It's OK that I'm this gun-toting girl in the sky. I'm not afraid of that."

Fisher later said, "I always felt as if I were a girl who was being led into this $10 million boys' toy." In The Princess Diarist, she wrote that she enjoyed making the "Star Wars" movies, "particularly as the only girl in an all-boy fantasy." She certainly never tired of poking fun at her participation in the phenomenal franchise, starting with those signature breakfast pastries on either side of her head, which she referred to as a "hair-don't instead of a hairdo."

And then there was that gold bikini.

During the merchandising push for "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens" in December 2015, a curious debate arose over the continued marketing of toys depicting Princess Leia in her scanty wardrobe as a slave for the loathsome alien Jabba the Hutt from "Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi." Fisher thought the controversy was "stupid" and "asinine."

In response to parents' concerns about how they could explain why she was in such a revealing getup to their children, Fisher responded in The Wall Street Journal, "Tell them that a giant slug captured me ('a giant testicle who has a lot of saliva going on' is how she described Jabba in the Los Angeles Times) and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn't like it. And then I took it off. Backstage."

Who wore it better? Mom Debbie Reynolds shows off her bikini body
on the set of the 1968 comedy "How Sweet It Is!" Daughter Carrie Fisher
relaxes between takes on the set of  1983's "Return of the Jedi."

During her one-woman show, "Wishful Drinking," which she adapted into a best-selling book in 2008, Fisher recalled seeing a figurine of Princess Leia in her slave garb at a comic book convention on a rotating on a turnstile that would afford a view up her dress of her "anatomically correct, though shaved galaxy snatch." Taken aback, Fisher phoned "Star Wars" guru George Lucas, who legally possesses the character's likeness, and said, "Owning my likeness does not include owning my lagoon of mystery!"

Carrie Fisher frolics in the surf for a 1983 Rolling
Stone magazine photo shoot promoting "Star Wars
Episode VI - Return of the Jedi."

Looking back on the role of Leia, Fisher would say, "I felt like that was somebody that could be heroic without being a superhero and be relatable." She did, however, wonder, "Who wears that much lip gloss into battle?"

Never mind the hair-don't, the braless gown, the slave bikini, and battlefield lipstick of "Star Wars," take a gander at what Aussie filmmakers made Carrie Fisher wear in a space oddity filmed Down Under titled "The Time Guardian," directed in 1987 by Brian Hannant, who co-scripted and handled second unit directing on "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior."

In the year 4039, survivors of the Neutron Wars in a time-traveling city, appropriately called the City, contend with a menacing race of beastly cyborgs called the Jen-Diki (attention: Lucasfilm attorneys), intent on eradicating humanity. Two soldiers from the City, played by Fisher and Tom Burlinson (best known for his starring role in the Australian "western" "The Man from Snowy River"), are transported to the Outback of the 1980s, pursued by an advance party of the Jen-Diki.

Presaging "Batman and Robin" by a decade, the makers of "The Time
Guardian" anticipated the ill-advised concept of male body armor
with nipples, which, thankfully, disappeared in a timely manner.

It would have been interesting to hear Carrie Fisher's sardonic motivation for presence as an undercover detective 1986's "Hollywood Vice Squad," a lurid potboiler inexplicably directed by a documentarian of LA's punk and heavy metal music scenes ("The Decline of Western Civilization"), Penelope Spheeris (who, just as unfathomably, migrated to making such pop-culture comedies as "Wayne's World" and "Black Sheep").

Carrie Fisher dresses to the nines as an undercover hooker.

The eclectic cast of "Hollywood Vice Squad" included Ronny Cox ("Deliverance," "Beverly Hills Cop," "RoboCop"), Frank Gorshin (TV's "Batman" nemesis The Riddler), Evan C. Kim (best known for his on-the-button impression of Bruce Lee in "The Kentucky Fried Movie"), Joey Travolta, and former wrestler H.B. ("Hard-Boiled") Haggerty.

Probably not prominently mentioned in her list of film credits,
"Hollywood Vice Squad" marked the movie debut of Robin Wright,
the screen's future "Princess Bride," playing a drug-addicted teen
runaway-turned-porn starlet, mentored by sleazy Frank Gorshin.

The "Miami Vice"-wannabe was the inspiration for the fictional film being made in the 1990 movie "Postcards from the Edge," based on Carrie Fisher's best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel that satirized her acting career, her offscreen struggle with substance abuse and bipolar disorder, and her often stormy relationship with her mom. Directed by Mike Nichols, the dark comedy featured Meryl Streep as the surrogate Fisher and Shirley MacLaine in the Debbie Reynolds role.

Behind the camera, Carrie Fisher had rewritten bits of her dialogue in the original "Star Wars" trilogy after witnessing Harrison Ford beef up his lines as Han Solo to his advantage. After writing the screenplay for "Postcards from the Edge," Fisher was asked by Steven Spielberg in 1991 to rewrite Julia Roberts' dialogue as Tinker Bell in "Hook," launching, in effect, her lucrative but uncredited side career as an in-demand script doctor.

In the wake of Fisher's passing, Graeme McMillan, a freelance writer for The Hollywood Reporter and Playboy.com, noted, "If you grew up with the cinema of the 1990s, chances are you're a fan of her writing and you didn't even know it." Earning a reputation as the go-to fixer-upper who could revitalize dull dialogue with sharp-edged humor and flesh out flaccid female roles, she once said her job was to "make the women smarter and the love scenes better."

Her handiwork enlivened "Sister Act," "Lethal Weapon 3," "The Last Action Hero," "The River Wild," "The Wedding Singer," and "Coyote Ugly." When she worked on the script for "Scream 3," she even wrote herself into the movie with a cameo as a sarcastic, chain-smoking actress who looks a lot like Carrie Fisher (pictured below) and carps, "I was up for the part of Princess Leia. But who gets it? The girl who slept with George Lucas!"

Some of the screenplays Fisher doctored that she would have liked to have forgotten included "Milk Money," starring Melanie Griffith "My Girl 2," featuring Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, "The Mirror Has Two Faces," starring Barbra Streisand (who also directed) and Jeff Bridges, and "The Out-of-Towners," with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn.

It was rumored that George Lucas asked her to punch up the screenplays for the trilogy of "Star Wars" prequels. By the early 2000s, however, Fisher suddenly gave up doctoring scripts because she was tired of dealing with the bureaucracy of making movies. She said, "There's more hoop-jumping now." In 2008, she told Newsweek that "younger people came to do it, and I started to do new things."

She also continued to work as an actress in films and television. She had roles in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," "Appointment with Death," starring Peter Ustinov as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, in a cast that included Lauren Bacall and John Gielgud, "Loverboy," with Patrick Dempsey, Kate Jackson, Barbara Carrera, and Kirstie Alley, and, among several others, "Soapdish," an ensemble comedy featuring Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Robert Downey Jr., and Whoopi Goldberg.

She costarred with Tom Hanks in two movies: "The Man with One Red Shoe" (pictured above), an espionage comedy directed by Stan Dragoti ("Mr. Mom"), and "The 'Burbs" (pictured below), a dark comedy directed by Joe Dante ("Gremlins") and featuring Bruce Dern, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schaal, and Henry Gibson.

One of Carrie Fisher's most memorable post-"Star Wars" roles was as Meg Ryan's scene-stealing best friend in 1989's "When Harry Met Sally..." directed by Rob Reiner from an Oscar-nominated script by Nora Ephron. Fisher (pictured below, with Meg Ryan) was nominated as Funniest Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture at the 1990 American Comedy Awards.

On the other side of the coin, Carrie Fisher considered "Under the Rainbow," a 1981 comedy that paired her with Chevy Chase, the worst movie she ever made. Time magazine's review summed up the premise of the film thus: "In 1939 MGM spent $1.2 million to make 'The Wizard of Oz'; in 1981 Orion Pictures has devoted $17 million to a modern farce about the hundreds of (little people) who went to Hollywood to play the Oz Munchkins, and by their lewd shenanigans cut the town down to size. 'Rainbow's' plot is serviceably convoluted, involving a secret service agent (Chevy Chase), a paranoid...duke and his Sicilian assassin-in-waiting, a pair of Axis spies, 25 Japanese camera buffs, four dead dogs and 150 little people. Make that 151: Carrie Fisher plays their den mother."

Director Steve Rash ("The Buddy Holly Story") seemed intent on retooling 1940s screwball comedies, featuring madcap mistaken identities, pell-mell encounters and mix-ups, and various fast-paced mischief. 

A half-naked Carrie Fisher is held at sword-point by Nazi spy Billy
Barty (the real-life founder of the Little People of America non-profit
organization) in "Under the Rainbow," a movie guaranteed to offend
little people, women, African-Americans, Italians, Japanese, Germans,
and sheep molesters, but oddly no jokes about homosexuals. 

When her memory may have been clouded by her addiction to pills and alcohol, Judy Garland recalled the Munchkin cast as "little drunks. They got smashed every night, and the police had to pick them up in butterfly nets." A number of Munchkin performers undoubtedly did drink during their nine-week stay in the Culver City Hotel. In the book The Making of The Wizard of Oz, author Aljean Harmetz noted, "Culver City was full of bars, and the bars were full of big people who bought the little people drinks." The facts are that rumors over the years about the Munchkin actors indulging in drunken orgies have been disproved. At their worst, they threatened to go on strike after hearing that they weren't going to get paid.

It might seem that Carrie Fisher spends a lot of time
in the movie in her underwear, and we promise she was
fully dressed before being trapped in a frozen meat
locker here with bumbling G-man Chevy Chase.

The cost of the film actually neared $20 million, and despite a disappointing $3 million at the domestic box office, it eventually gained a cult following of adoring fans. One critic who was not amused accused the picture of "pandering to a caricature that is insulting - all of the little people in the film seem to have no more of a mental age of children that have been left to run riot in a playground without adult supervision." The cast of little people included Jerry Maren, one of the original members of the Lollipop Guild in "The Wizard of Oz" (and, at 96, the last surviving Munchkin performer), who regretted appearing in "Under the Rainbow" because it was in such poor taste. He iterated that nothing remotely resembling the mayhem depicted on the screen happened during the original production.

Who wore the least the best? (Left) Mom Debbie Reynolds confronts
bewildered husband James Garner in "How Sweet It Is!" (1968);
(right) daughter Carrie Fisher poses on the set of "Under the Rainbow."

Self-admittedly another negligible sidestep in Carrie Fisher's filmography has to be 2010's "Sorority Row," an unasked-for remake of the sleazy 1983 slasher flick "The House on Sorority Row." Filmed in the photogenic environs of the greater Pittsburgh area, the movie's Greek house of mean girls included Brianna Evigan, daughter of "B.J. and the Bear" and "My Two Dads" star Greg Evigan, and Rumer Willis, eldest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.

Three decades after wielding an M16, an M1 flamethrower, and a quad rocket launcher as the jilted mystery woman stalking John Belushi in "The Blues Brothers," Carrie Fisher proved she could still brandish preemptive firepower as the house mother in "Sorority Row," protecting her girls from a psychotic killer armed with a customized automotive lug wrench. Of course, the low-budget spatter film features the requisite shower scenes, along with, to quote the A.V. Club's Steven Hyden, "a slow-motion pillow fight, an event that has not happened even once in real life."

"I end up being the bad ass," Fisher later remarked in an interview. "Somehow the sorority mother ends up knowing how to shoot a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun, which you have to know nowadays to work in a sorority."

"Star Wars: Episode VIII," due in theaters in December of this year, finished shooting last summer, although details concerning the plot, as well as what part Leia plays in the story, have been kept under wraps.

In May 2016, a documentary titled "Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds" debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Co-produced by Carrie's brother, Todd Fisher, the movie, which offered an intimate portrait of the remarkably close relationship between daughter and mother, had its broadcast premiere on HBO on January 7, 2017, around a week and half after both had passed. The overall favorable critical consensus was that the documentary is a "touching, bittersweet, ultimately charming love story that serves as a poignantly effective tribute to the complicated, uniquely resilient mother-daughter duo."

Three generations celebrate a mother's Life Achievement Award
Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, and Carrie's daughter, Billie Lourd.

The film culminates with Carrie presenting her mother with the Life Achievement Award at the 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild in January 2015 (pictured above and below).

On the day of Carrie Fisher's death, the day before her own demise, Debbie Reynolds posted on Facebook: "Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter. I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop. Love, Carrie's Mother."

Raised Protestant, Carrie Fisher often attended Jewish services, the faith of her father, Eddie Fisher, but she enjoyed describing herself as an "enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God."

In her memoir, Wishful Drinking, she said, "No matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled in my own bra."