Drowned In Moonlight, Strangled By Her Own Bra

I realize this is late - between me being away, me arranging my thoughts on the matter, and the ARE/OmniLit fiasco...

...but this one hit me hard. I am not entirely sure why. (Maybe it's the dog).

But what I wanted to say about Carrie Fisher, other than the above "joke" cause of death, which is posted at her own request, is this:

She was not just a princess.

To most of us, she was Princess Leia, but here's the thing. She first took the role of Leia when she was 19 years old. She did five movies as Leia - A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return Of The Jedi (1983), The Force Awakens (2015) and Episode VII - which has no announced title (2017).

So, that's...let's do the math. 32 years in which she was not Princess Leia. That's longer than some of the people reading this have lived.

So, what I really wanted to do was point out all the other things she was:

Carrie Fisher's IMDB page lists 90 total acting credits, although one of them is marked as "Announced" and presumably will not happen now.

Of those credits, she was Princess Leia in 8 of them - the five movies, the Star Wars Holiday Special in 1988, the Robot Chicken Star Wars episode (in which she was also Mon Mothma), and the Lego Star Wars video game.

So, that's 81 credits in which she was, you know, not Princess Leia.

And that's just as an actor.

Carrie also has 11 writer credits, two of which are documentaries she did on her own experiences in Hollywood.

She has 11 soundtrack credits as a performer. Yes, she could sing - not surprising giving her mother, Debbie Reynolds (Also RIP - very sad) was a musical performer.

She has one producer credit, for a TV movie called "These Old Broads."

And...that's just what's publicly credited. See, Fisher was also something called a "script doctor" - which is movie-speak for a script editor. Somebody who takes a script and improves it. Script doctors are generally uncredited, but they salvage broken movies all the time. She actually rewrote some of her own dialogue in ESB, which got her a gig writing an episode of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

In fact, Carrie Fisher was one of the top script doctors in Hollywood in the 1990s. She may actually have been a better script doctor than actor.

Some movies she worked on included the prequel trilogy (would they have been even, uh, worse without her), Hook, Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, The River Wild, Made IN America, Outbreak, The Wedding Singer, So I Married An Axe Murderer, Intolerable Cruelty, Scream 3, Coyote Ugly, Kate & Leopold, Mr. And Mrs. Smith. She stopped doing it in the 2000s because she didn't like how the process had changed. But look at that list of movies.

And she also wrote books - five novels - Wishful Drinking, Surrender The Pink, Delusions of Grandma, The Best Awful and Postcards from the Edge.

And then there were the non-fiction books based on her own life, her struggles with bipolar disorder and addiction.

But far too many people remember her in that dang metal bikini.

So, I wanted to give a shout out to Carrie Fisher

Actor
Singer
Script doctor
Scriptwriter
Novelist
Non-fiction writer

...and yes, princess. In so many ways.

(By the way, if anyone's worried about the dog, Billie Lourdes took him in).