Carrie Fisher talks being skint and resorting to signings at fan events

As more detail drip feeds from Carrie Fisher’s new memoir ‘The Princess Diarist’, so too does more insight into the ups and downs of the Star Wars actress’s fascinating career.

And not just that fling she had with Harrison Ford.

In new material (as reported on Deadline), she also reveals how she eventually succumbed to the ‘celebrity lap dance’ of fan events like Comic-Con when she realised she was seriously running out of money.

“I had become a poor rich person,” she writes, adding that Star Wars had not been the cash cow for her that many presumed it was.

“Not by a long, long, long shot,” she continues. “Holding out for points or a piece of the merchandising was not an option for – or even something that would ever have occurred to – a nineteen-year-old signing on for her first lead role in a little space movie.”

It was later that she bit the bullet.

“How did I get here,” she writes. “I didn’t need money this badly, did I? Well, that all depends on your definition of need.”

Though she had made good money in her 20s – she was just 19 when she made the first Star Wars movie – two decades later and a ‘pilfering business manager’ had left her strapped and with a ‘house the bank lets me live in, for now’.

However, considering that a Hollywood Reporter article earlier this year revealed that stars can come home with ‘garbage bags full of $20s’, and easily make six-figures in a weekend, it’s perhaps not such a hardship.

She goes on: “There’s something incredibly sweet and mystifying about people waiting in lines for so long. The ‘Star Wars’ films touched them in some incredibly profound or significant way.”

However, she tells one story about a meeting with a young fan which didn’t go so well, the little girl in question horrified at Fisher’s ‘melted’ older face.

“‘No!,’ she wailed,” writes Fisher, “squirming her head away from the sight of me. ‘I want the other Leia, not the old one’.”

She also reveals in the book that she had a fling with Harrison Ford while making the first Star Wars movie. Ford was married with two children at the time.

‘The Princess Diarist’ is out now.

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