Carrie Fisher appreciation: Not a great movie actress, but one of the wittiest observers of the Hollywood she emerged from

Her filmography was lopsided, but in her writing she displayed a Dorothy Parker-like wit

The role of Princess Leia will ensure Carrie Fisher immortality in film (Rex Features)

Carrie Fisher’s death aged only 60 is all the more shocking given that so many of us will have had their last glimpse of her in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, playing Princess Leia (undoubtedly her most famous role). Whether through the wonders of digital technology or the fervent suspension of disbelief on behalf of fans, Star Wars characters such as Leia seemed immune to the ravages of age. It is startling, too, to think that Fisher has predeceased her mother, Debbie Reynolds, the star of Singin’ In The Rain and Hollywood royalty from an earlier generation.

In terms of her screen persona, Fisher was a very contradictory figure. If you see her in her screen debut as Lorna Karpf in Shampoo (1975), opposite Warren Beatty’s hirsute, medallion-wearing Lothario of a Hollywood hairdresser, she seems coquettish and mischievous in the extreme. “Are you gay?” the young temptress in a very short tennis skirt asks Beatty’s character (who is already having an affair with her mother). When she establishes that he is not, she promptly has a fling with him too. Lorna seems the quintessential Californian brat, precocious, jaded and ready to do anything to annoy her parents.

Lorna is a very long way removed from the principled and courageous Princess Leia in her trademark ringlets in the first Star Wars film in 1977.

In truth, Fisher’s filmography was lopsided. There were the Star Wars films which made her internationally famous – and then there were a lot of not very distinguished comedies. She was in some fine movies but very rarely in major roles. She was a caterer with a love of architecture and opera in Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters and she was Meg Ryan’s best friend in When Harry Met Sally. Outside Star Wars, though, she was as well known for her writing as for her acting. Fisher had a Dorothy Parker-like wit. In her fiction, she drew heavily on her own struggles with addiction and depression and her turbulent private life. She had a very fiery relationship with singer-songwriter Paul Simon, whom she married in 1984, divorced a year later but continued to see. “We had a similar sense of humour, and our fights were sometimes hilarious.” she later told The New York Times.

Her semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From The Edge was a bestseller. It dealt in unsentimental and acerbic fashion with the plight of a fictional actress, Suzanne Vale, who just like Fisher herself was a Hollywood insider with a self-destructive streak. “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number,” reads the opening line. “I wasn’t feeling my most attractive. I’d thrown up scallops and Percodan on him the night before in the emergency room.”

When Mike Nichols made a film of Postcards From The Edge (1990), Fisher scripted it. She would also obviously have made perfect casting for the lead role but, in the end, Suzanne was played by Meryl Streep. As ever, Streep gave a fine performance – but she didn’t bring the humour to the part that Fisher surely would have done.

At the end of her life, Fisher still took a mischievous pleasure in her ability to provoke and tantalise the media. Her recent revelation in her final book The Princess Diarist that she had had an affair with Harrison Ford 40 years before sent gossip columnists both side of the Atlantic into a mini-frenzy.

Fisher can’t be called a great movie actress. Her film career was very uneven, bookended by Star Wars and full of supporting roles in comedies of variable quality. Nonetheless, the role of Princess Leia alone guarantees her some sort of immortality and she is also likely to be looked back on as one of the wittiest and most perceptive observers of the Hollywood from which she emerged.