Carrie Fisher didn’t just embody one of the best-loved, most instantly recognisable and unfailingly badass screen heroines of all time (that’s the Star Wars saga’s Princess Leia, as if you need reminding). The actress, who has died aged 60 after a heart attack, was also a brilliant writer and devastatingly funny to boot: just look at her novels and memoirs, or dive down a YouTube hole of her chat show appearances – often accompanied by her therapy dog, Gary – for proof.
Famous for her no-holds-barred takes (as Carrie put it herself, ‘I’ll never be known for my work with boundaries'), she was refreshingly outspoken on everything from her mental health to Hollywood’s inability to let women age on screen, body image to that cinnamon bun hair-do. It's perhaps this honesty - alongside her iconic Star Wars role - that meant 'she was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly,' as her only daughter, Billie Lourd, put it in a statement. So what better way to celebrate the galaxy’s brightest – and sharpest – star than in her own words?
On her career
'There is no point at which you can say, "Well, I’m successful now. I might as well take a nap.”'
'I don't want my life to imitate art, I want my life to be art.'
'Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.'
On mental illness
'I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on.'
'I feel I'm very sane about how crazy I am.'
'At times, being bi-polar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.'
'Bipolar disorder can be a great teacher. It's a challenge, but it can set you up to do almost anything else in your life.'
On her Hollywood family
'Debbie [Reynolds, her actress mother] remains the girl-next-door, whereas I live somewhere down the street.'
'I am truly a product of Hollywood in-breeding. When two celebrities mate, someone like me is the result.'
'At a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do. She called Cary Grant.'
On beauty and body image
'Please stop debating about whether or not I aged well. Youth and beauty are not accomplishments, they're the temporary, happy by-products of time and / or DNA. Don't hold your breath for either.'
'We treat beauty like an accomplishment, and that is insane'
'I think of my body as a side effect of my mind'
On ageing in Hollywood
'There are not a lot of choices for women past 27. I don’t wait by the phone.'
'Females get hired along procreative lines. After 40, we're kind of cooked.'
1'They want to hire part of me, not all of me. They want to hire three fourths, so I have to get rid of the fourth somehow. The fourth can’t be with me.'
On Star Wars
'People are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit. Yes, we all knew. The only one who didn't know was George [Lucas].'
'Even in space there's a double standard for women.'
On playing Leia
'I got to be the only girl in an all boy fantasy, and it’s a great role for women. She’s a very proactive character and gets the job done. So if you’re going to get typecast as something, that might as well be it for me.'
'I like Princess Leia. I like how she handles things. I like how she treats people. She tells the truth. She, you know, gets what she wants done. I don't have a real problem with Princess Leia. I've sort of melded with her over time.'
'People want me to say that I’m sick of playing Leia and that it ruined my life. If my life was that easy to ruin, it deserved to be ruined.'
On her Star Wars legacy
'I signed my likeness away. Every time I look in the mirror, I have to send [George] Lucas a couple of bucks.'
'I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?'
On acting
'I'm not really one of those actresses like Meryl Streep. Those actresses travel outside themselves and play characters. And I'm more of an archaeologist. I play what I am. I dig what I can. It's a character that's not too far from myself, except I don't have any laser guns.
On writing
'I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.'
On how she wanted to be remembered
'I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.'