Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Mark Hamill Bids Heartbreaking Farewell to Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher passed away on December 27.


In the immediate aftermath of this shocking and tragic turn of events, nearly all of Hollywood gathered on social media to pay their respects to the Star Wars actress.


But a handful of new tributes have made the Internet rounds over the past couple days.


And these come from people who knew Fisher best.



To ring in 2017, for example, daughter Billie Lourd released her very first statement.


It was a response to all her social media followers who have wished the actress well in the wake of both Carrie Fisher dying (her mom) and Debbie Reynolds dying (her grandmother).


“Receiving all of your prayers and kind words over the past week has given me strength during a time I thought strength could not exist,” Lourd wrote on Instagram, adding:


“There are no words to express how much I will miss my Abadaba and my own and only Momby. Your love and support means the world to me.”


Then, actress Joely Fisher, Carrie’s half-sister, penned a lengthy guest column for The Hollywood Reporter in which said she and Carrie had planned to sped Christmas together.


Which did end up happening.


But it involved Joely sitting alongside Carrie in the hospital.


“You all lost Princess Leia and Carrie Fisher; I lost my hero, my mentor, my mirror,” Fisher wrote. “My brother Todd has lost his sister and his mother, whom he has said will lay to rest together.


“There is no universe where these ladies are not due their appropriate pedestals, and both will be memorialized in separate ceremonies in coming weeks.


“We will honor these two magical people who have left the tribe in the way they lived, with grandeur and grace. I will soldier on.”



And now Mark Hamill is here to pay tribute to Carrie Fisher.


The former Star Wars icon has done so in his own letter, which has also been published by The Hollywood Reporter.


It opens as follows:


“Carrie and I occupied a unique area in each other’s lives. It was like we were in a garage band together that somehow hit it huge. We had no idea the impact Star Wars would have on the world.


“I remember we were out on tour right before the movie opened. By the time we got to Chicago, there was a crowd at the airport. I said, ‘Hey look, you guys, there must be somebody famous on the plane.’ I was looking around to see who it might be.


“And then in the crowd I saw a kid dressed in a Han Solo vest. Then I saw girl dressed like Princess Leia. I said, ‘Oh my God, look, Carrie – there’s somebody dressed just like you. She’s got the buns on her head!"”


How did Hamill feel when he met Fisher in 1976, just prior to filming Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope? Bowled over, he wrote.



“She was just so instantly ingratiating and funny and outspoken. She had a way of just being so brutally candid. I’d just met her but it was like talking to a person you’d known for 10 years….


“She just sucked you into her world.”


Especially in her later years, Fisher would become well known for her sense of humor.


But Hamill had a front row seat to it from the very beginning.


“I would do crazy things to amuse her on the set,” Hamill writes. “Making her laugh was always a badge of honor…The lengths I would go to hear her laugh – there were no limits. I loved her and loved making her laugh.”


Hamill continued, documenting over four decades of friendship with Fisher.


“Part of what was so poignant about her was that she was vulnerable, that there was this glimmer of a little girl that was so appealing and it roused the protective nature in my personality…


“We ran the gamut over the years, where we were in love with each other, where we hated each other’s guts… We went through it all. It’s like we were a family.”



Best of all, Hamill told The Hollywood Reporter that Fisher “was able to make you feel like you were the most important thing in her life. I think that’s a really rare quality.”


He concluded:


“She was a handful. She was high maintenance. But my life would have been so much drabber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was.”


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