On May 4th, “Star Wars” day, Carrie Fisher (1956-2016) received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The ceremony for the actress, best known as Princess Leia from the popular sci-fi saga, was attended by her daughter Billie Lourd, 30, and Mark Hamill, 71, among others. Lourd and the Luke Skywalker actor remembered Fisher fondly.
Hamill met Fisher when she was 19. “She was so charming, so funny, so gorgeous, so wise for her age. I just couldn’t believe it,” the actor said. But his colleague and girlfriend was also “brutally open”. He wanted to write down some thoughts about the ceremony in a notebook, but then he found words that he had written shortly after Fisher’s death.
“Carrie was one of a kind. […] Hell, she was our princess,” Hamill said. “She has played such a pivotal role in my professional and personal life and both would have been so much emptier without her.” For him, everything would have been “a lot more monotonous and less exciting if she hadn’t been the friend she was”. He will never stop missing her, but is grateful “for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness, and even the spoiled, rampant crap my beloved space twin has driven me insane with over the years. So thank you, Carrie I love you.”
“Mom, you did it,” Lourd declared during the ceremony. Like most children, she thought at the time that her mother was embarrassing. She wanted to change her daughter’s mind with the “cool movie” she was in. “‘Star Wars’ I don’t know if any of you guys have ever heard of it,” joked Lourd.
Whenever she turned on the film, the young Billie rolled her eyes or complained: “It’s too loud, mom.” It was in high school that Lourd finally decided to watch Star Wars himself, “not because I suddenly got a passionate interest in ’70s sci-fi, but because guys came up to me and said that They had ‘fantasies’ about my mother”.
No, they couldn’t possibly be talking about their mother, Lourd thought to himself. “I wanted to hate [the movie] so I could tell her how lame she was. Like any kid, I didn’t want my mom to be hot or cool. She was my mom!” But that day, as she stared at the screen, she realized “that no one is or ever will be as hot or cool as Princess Leia.” And nobody could have played the character quite like her mother. Lourd is now an obsessive Star Wars fan.
Visibly moved, she also spoke about her own children, son Kingston (2) and her daughter Jackson, who was born just a few months ago. “I’m lucky that they will get to know a part of her through Leia, even though they won’t be able to see my mother anymore,” the actress said. She can then proudly tell them that “the little lady on TV” is her grandmother. She also can’t wait to show her kids the star on the Walk of Fame “when they’re old enough to understand how cool it is.”