She played one of the most iconic heroes in Hollywood history. Who will ever forget Carrie Fisher’s turn as Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy? And now, she’s reprising her role in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens due out this December.
But off screen, Fisher has battled bipolar disorder for decades. And she’s a recovering addict.
Humorously, she notes in her one-woman show and bestselling memoir Wishful Drinking that she is both a PEZ dispenser and in the Abnormal Psychology textbook.
But her drug use goes way back to the age of 13, when she smoked pot for the first time with a friend in a tree house in Palm Springs. However, Fisher would go on to prefer LSD.
When her famous parents, actress Debbie Reynolds and musician Eddie Fisher, discovered she was taking acid, they enlisted Hollywood royalty Cary Grant to tell her to stop. Grant had taken LSD experimentally under a doctor’s supervision and told Fisher not to take it. She didn’t listen.
Like many addicts, Fisher would graduate up to harder drugs after her teenage years.
She admitted to doing cocaine on the set of The Empire Strikes Back, in an interview with an Australian newspaper.
Also in Wishful Drinking, Fisher recounts a manic episode in which she stayed up for six days straight. Psychosis is bound to happen when someone stays up that long, and for Fisher, she thought everything on TV was about her.
Fisher came out as bipolar to Diane Sawyer in a 2000 interview for 20/20.
“I used to think I was a drug addict, pure and simple,” she said. “Just someone who could not stop taking drugs willfully. And I was that. But it turns out that I am severely manic depressive.”
She admitted to Sawyer that at one point in time she was taking 30 Oxycodone per day to quell the mania.
“I have two moods,” she continued. “One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs… Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it’s out… I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital.”
Most recently, Fisher had a manic episode on a cruise ship one year ago in which she performed a couple of slurred songs and allowed her dog to shit onstage. She went to the mental hospital following the incident to readjust her medication.
In a rare show of seriousness in Wishful Drinking, Fisher eloquently describes the need to end the stigma regarding mental illness.
“In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls,” Fisher says in the book. “Not unlike a tour of duty in Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of.”
Master Yoda would be proud too. Wise words from Princess Leia these are.
