Carrie Fisher, the actress best known as Princess Leia Organa in Star Wars, has died after suffering a heart attack. She was 60.
Family spokesman Simon Halls released a statement on behalf of Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd:
“It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning,” reads the statement.
“She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly. Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”
Fisher was flying from London to Los Angeles on Friday, Dec. 23, when she went into cardiac arrest. Paramedics removed her from the flight and rushed her to a nearby hospital, where she was treated for a heart attack. She later died in the hospital.
The daughter of showbiz veteran Debbie Reynolds and entertainer Eddie Fisher, Fisher was brought up in the sometimes tumultuous world of film, theatre and television.
Escaping Hollywood in 1973, the star enrolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she spent over a year studying acting.
Just two years later, though, the bright lights of Hollywood drew her back, and Fisher made her film debut in the Warren Beatty-lead Shampoo.
Her role in Star Wars would follow in 1977 – the experience she recently detailed in memoir, The Princess Diarist. She was only 19 when the first installment of the beloved sci-fi franchise was filmed.
In addition to the second and third Star Wars films – and last year’s The Force Awakens – Fisher starred in 1980’s The Blues Brothers, The Man with One Red Shoe, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 and, later, When Harry Met Sally.
Fisher wed musician Paul Simon in 1983. It was an explosive marriage, according to Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon author Peter Ames Carlin, and was cut short by swinging stages of depression, the actresses’ drug use and an array of personal insecurities. The relationship continued, though, on-and-off for several years after the pair divorced in 1984.
The star’s substance abuse problem was well-known, starting at only age 13 when she first started smoking marijuana, Fisher previously told The Telegraph. She said she later dabbled in drugs like cocaine and LSD. Fisher’s addiction was largely profiled in her 1987 best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, which was later turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep.
“I never could take alcohol. I always said I was allergic to alcohol, and that’s actually a definition to alcoholism — an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind,” Fisher told the Herald-Tribune in 2013. “So I didn’t do other kinds of drugs until I was about 20. Then, by the time I was 21 it was LSD. I didn’t love cocaine, but I wanted to feel any way other than the way I did, so I’d do anything.”
In 1985, Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she told the Herald-Tribune, and subsequently became an outspoken advocate for mental health awareness.