For the rest of her life she would be both adored by millions and haunted by what that role turned her into. She spoke about it with a rare, brave honesty that made people love her even more — and her story is a reminder that the people we envy most are often fighting the hardest battles of all.
She was Carrie Fisher, and the film was Star Wars. Princess Leia made her one of the most recognized faces on the planet at twenty-one — her image on toys, posters, and lunchboxes in every country on earth, a level of fame she once compared to living inside someone else’s dream. Behind it, she was fighting addiction and, later, a bipolar diagnosis — battles she eventually wrote and spoke about with a candor almost no star of her stature had ever risked.
That honesty became her second legacy. Long before it was acceptable, she stood on stages and joked about her mental illness by name, and thousands of people sought help because a princess said out loud what they were hiding. She died in 2016, one day before her mother, Debbie Reynolds — an ending nobody wanted.
If you remember seeing that film in a theater in 1977, tell me where you were in the comments. And share this for everyone who loved her — not the princess, the person.
Related Posts
My Grandmother Lived in Our Basement for Nine Years While My Aunt Collected Her Social Security Check Every Month and Told the Entire Family She Was Paying for a Nursing Home – and the Day I Finally Found the Bank Statements Hidden in a Coffee Can Under the Sink Was the Day Everything My Aunt Had Built on Top of That Lie Came Apart at Once
My grandmother’s name was Vera, and she was a small woman who wore the same three housedresses on a rotating schedule…
My Husband of Twenty-Two Years Sat Me Down After Both Kids Left for College and Told Me He Had a Daughter From Before We Met That He Had Never Told Me About – But Nothing Could Have Prepared Me for the Phone Call That Came From That Daughter Six Days Later, and the Truth She Carried That Broke Open Everything I Thought Our Marriage Had Been Built On
Kevin sat down across from me at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning in October, and I knew immediately that…
The Morning My Mother-in-Law Told Me I Would Never Truly Belong to Their Family, I Said Nothing and Smiled – But Over the Next Six Months I Quietly Prepared the One Truth That Would Force Every Person at That Thanksgiving Table to Finally Understand Exactly Who I Was, What I Had Built, and Why I Was Never, Ever Leaving
She said it on a Sunday afternoon in April, standing in her own kitchen while she arranged flowers in a vase her son…
Three Weeks After My Father’s Funeral, While Cleaning Out His Closet, I Found a Bundle of Letters Tied With Red String That Revealed He Had Been Sending Money Every Single Month for Thirty-One Years to a Woman Named Patricia – and the Address on the Last Envelope Led Me Straight to the Half-Sister I Never Knew Existed, and to a Truth About My Father That Changed Every Memory I Had of Him Forever
I found the letters on a Tuesday afternoon in November, three weeks after we buried my father, while I was doing the…
Get Heartwarming Stories in Your Inbox
Join thousands of readers getting uplifting stories every week.