“Star Wars” Day got a little extra shine on Thursday.
The late Carrie Fisher, who’s widely known for her role as Princess Leia in George Lucas’ beloved franchise, received a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 4 — which has long been considered the unofficial holiday for all things“Star Wars.” (May the 4th is a play on the line “May the force be with you.”)
Seven years after her 2016 death at age 60, her co-star Mark Hamill and her daughter Billie Lourd remembered Fisher by honoring her with touching speeches at the ceremony.
Hamill remembered his first impression of Fisher.
“I remember thinking, ‘She’s 19 years old, she’s barely out of high school.’ I was a worldly 24 ― and every expectation I had was just obliterated,” he recalled. “She was so charming, so funny, so adorable, so wise beyond her years. I just couldn’t believe it.”
“And brutally frank!,” he added to laughs from the crowd. “She started telling me stories — intimate stories — about her family that I was thinking, ‘Should I be hearing this?’ I mean, these were things that I would probably not tell friends unless I knew them for years. But that was Carrie. She also had a wisdom that seemed to be far beyond what a 19-year-old should be expected to have.”
He also admitted that he struggled to find the right words to do Fisher justice in his speech, so he went back to a Facebook post he shared shortly after her death and then read it aloud.
“Carrie was one-of-a-kind who belonged to us all — whether she liked it or not. She was OUR Princess, damn it, & the actress who played her blurred into one gorgeous, fiercely independent & ferociously funny, take-charge woman who took our collective breath away.”
He concluded his speech by acknowledging that it’s sad that Fisher couldn’t have been there for the ceremony, “but she wouldn’t want us to be sad. She’d want us to have fun. She’d want us to laugh.”
Lourd spoke a few moments later, admitting that when she was young she didn’t quite get all the hype around “Star Wars” and her mother.
“Like most kids, I grew up thinking my mom was a little bit — OK, a lot — embarrassing,” Lourd began. “She tried to alter my opinion by showing me this ‘cool movie’ she was in, ‘Star Wars.’ I don’t know if any of you have ever heard of it, I haven’t.”
Lourd added: “She used to love to tell the story of how every time she would try to put it on, I would roll my eyes and yell, ‘It’s too loud, Mommy!’ Or fearfully question, ‘Is that lady in the TV you?’”
Lourd admitted that she refused to watch the “Star Wars” movies until middle school, when “boys started coming up to me and telling me they ‘fantasized’ about my mom.”
So Lourd finally decided to press play.
“I went home to investigate who this person was they were talking about. I finally watched the movie I had forever considered too loud and finally figured out what all the fuss was about with the lady in the TV,” Lourd recalled. “I wanted to hate it 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, staring at the screen, I realized no one is or will ever be as hot or as cool as Princess Leia.”
Lourd said that later that same year, she accompanied her mother to Comic-Con — and her mom’s hot and cool factors finally sunk in.
“People of all ages from all over the world were dressed up like my mom, the lady who sang me to sleep at night and held me when I was scared. Watching the amount of joy it brought to people when she hugged them or threw glitter at them — sorry about that — was incredible to witness. People waited in line for hours just to meet her. People had tattoos of her, people named their children after her, people had stories of how she saved their lives. It was a side of my mom I had never seen before, and it was magical,” recalled Lourd. “I realized then that Leia is more than just a character. She is a feeling. She is strength. She is grace. She is wit. She is femininity at its finest. She knows what she wants and she gets it. She doesn’t need anyone to rescue her because she rescues herself and even rescues the rescuers. And no one could have played her like my mother.”
Fisher could have coasted on her “Star Wars” fame but opted to not be defined by it — or her lifelong approximation to fame. (Her parents were actor Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher. She was also married to musician Paul Simon.)
After “Star Wars,” Fisher chose roles that showcased her comedic timing in scene-stealing turns in “The Blues Brothers,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “The ’Burbs” and “Soapdish.”
She was also a prolific author. Among her books was her semi-autobiographical and bestselling debut, “Postcards From the Edge.” Fisher went on to publish four more novels, in addition to three memoirs and several plays and screenplays. She was also an in-demand script doctor and helped zhush up a few well-known scripts before they were filmed, including “Hook,” “Sister Act” and “The Wedding Singer.”
“It’s hard to think of her in the past tense,” Hamill said during his speech.
“Had she only done Princess Leia, that would be enough,” Hamill noted in his Walk of Fame speech. “Had she just written one book, that alone would be something that would be enough to satisfy someone who wanted to make a mark on the world. But she did it from every different direction. … She really was just such an original.”