Carrie Fisher, the brash and witty Hollywood princess who became a galactic princess in Star Wars and later found acclaim as an author and screenwriter, died on Tuesday after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles on Friday. She was 60.
Fisher’s death was confirmed to Entertainment Weekly and PEOPLE in a statement released by family spokesperson Simon Halls 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,” the statement read. “She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly. Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”
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Fisher was the daughter of entertainers Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and her early proximity to both the glamor and hypocrisies of fame gave her a lacerating perspective on show business that she wielded like a double-edged sword. As cutting as she could be about the industry, Fisher often saved her harshest words for herself.
That vulnerability became, ironically, a kind of armor. In her public appearances and writing, she never shied away from either the pain or the humor that she encountered along her unusual journey from being the child of celebrities to geekdom goddess to literary novelist.
In her recent memoir of 1977’s Star Wars, The Princess Diarist, she wrote about the difficulties of aging while constantly being confronted with affection from fans for her younger self. Eroticism clashed with neuroticism in typical Fisher fashion: “When men — 50-year-old-plus men down to… well, the age goes pretty low for statutory comfort — when men approach me to let me know that I was their first love, let’s just say I have mixed feelings. Why did all these men find it so easy to be in love with me then and so complex to be in love with me now?”
She made relentless jokes about her “gold bikini” in Return of the Jedi as well as her “baboon’s ass” hairdo in last year’s return to the character in The Force Awakens. Fisher both courted and tormented her Star Wars fans at once enjoying their adulation and recoiling from it, celebrating their devotion while also raising a skeptical eyebrow at it. Fisher never bought into the world’s crush on her, but she never wanted it to go away either.
She was born Oct. 21, 1956, in Beverly Hills, California, but she never knew a happy home with both parents. She was 2 years old when her parents divorced and her father married Elizabeth Taylor, and the break-up reverberated throughout her life and work. “You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Fisher wrote in her memoir, Wishful Drinking. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.”
Around age 12, Fisher started sharing the stage with her mother in a nightclub act. She started but never finished high school, choosing instead to join the Broadway musical Irene. She was 17 when she made her film debut opposite Warren Beatty in the 1975 sexual-revolution dramedy Shampoo, playing a tennis player who seduces her mother’s hairdresser and lover.
“My two scenes in Shampoo took only a few days to shoot, and when they were done, I went back to living at home with my mother and younger brother, Todd, hoping that I wouldn’t be living there for too much longer, as any amount of time was way too long for the now-too-hip-for-words me,” Fisher wrote in The Princess Diarist.
She went on to study at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama but never graduated. Two words interrupted her life and then changed it forever: Star Wars.