An appreciation: the humanity and self-lacerating humour of Carrie Fisher

“Some crappy dessert. Anything. I’ll take it all.”

That was Carrie Fisher ordering a midafternoon snack at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where she was doing interviews for Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, a documentary about her mother, Debbie Reynolds; Fisher confided that she’d wanted to make the film for the past few years because, as she explained, “my mother had been sort of declining, and I didn’t know how much longer she would be performing.”

In a cruel, cosmic twist Fisher herself would no doubt appreciate with her distinctive brand of gallows humour, she wound up going first - ahead of the mother whose multi-hyphenated gifts (singer-dancer-actress) and marriage to Eddie Fisher catapulted Carrie into fame that never seemed to fit her entirely comfortably.

She went into the family business as an actress, vaulting from off-screen Hollywood royalty to the on-screen version as a generation’s most revered space princess, along the way picking up and dropping a drug habit, turning it all into fodder for one of the finest, funniest show business memoirs ever written, albeit in the form of a semi-autobiographical novel. Movie fans may consider Postcards From the Edge a piquant Meryl Streep comedy, but writers worship the book for the same tough, wry self-awareness Fisher brought to her script-doctoring work (including uncredited improvements to the dialogue in The Empire Strikes Back and other Star Wars sequels), her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, and her actual memoir, the just-published The Princess Diarist.

Approaching the nearly deserted hotel dining room where Fisher was holding court at Cannes, a certain amount of anxiety was in order. She was, after all, a bona fide icon, whose contribution to Star Wars and its mythic status cannot be overstated, if only because her version of a princess was so subversively, sarcastically salty. She was also whip-smart, armed with a well-attuned b.s. detector and a lethally barbed verbal arsenal with which to enforce it.