The actor and writer Carrie Fisher has many talents but soothsaying appears not to be among them. “I don’t think there is an inexhaustible public appetite for Star Wars,” she said while promoting The Empire Strikes Back, the second in the blockbuster series in 1980. If only she could have foreseen the levels of excitement and anticipation surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh instalment, in which she will return alongside co-stars from the original trilogy including Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

Fisher accepted long ago that she would always be associated with her character from the series – Princess Leia, a plucky intergalactic warrior first seen in 1977 with a hairdo like two bagels clamped to either side of her head. Fisher referred to them as her “hairy earphones” and said: “I’ll go to my grave as Princess Leia. In the street, they call out, ‘Hey, Princess!’, which makes me feel like a poodle.” The great surprise is that it has not eclipsed or defined her. No matter how big the Star Wars franchise got, Princess Leia never overshadowed the woman who plays her.

‘Hairy earphones’ Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope Photograph: Allstar/Lucasfilm/Sportsphoto Ltd

The actor and director Selina Cadell, an old friend of Fisher’s from their days at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the mid-1970s, says this is easily explained. “It’s because of her eccentricity,” she tells me. “You can always feel that in everything she does and I think it’s what makes her a real star in that sense. It’s just a shame that Hollywood never understood her. She was always more unusual and gifted than most of the girls they trot out.”



Fisher can certainly produce sharper dialogue in real life than anything the Star Wars creator George Lucas ever gave her, rattling off zingers and one-liners with an aplomb that has earned her comparisons with Dorothy Parker. She has a swagger rarely permitted to Princess Leia. (“A lot of it was just running down corridors,” she said of the first movie.) And her own background is more fascinating than anything involving Wookiees and droids. As the pill-popping, coke-snorting, rehab-attending daughter of a celebrity couple, Fisher sounds like the ultimate Hollywood cliche. The miracle has been her ability to transform the events of her life from car-crash to glistening black comedy without sacrificing any of the authenticity.

Her parents, the actor Debbie Reynolds and the crooner Eddie Fisher, divorced when she was 18 months old: her father ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, her mother turned to booze. In interviews during the Star Wars years, Fisher affected nonchalance about that break-up. “All I was aware of was that daddy met a pretty lady and left mommy, and that a short while after that, the pretty lady met someone else and left daddy, who met another pretty lady, ad infinitum. So what?”



Coming out the other side of an addiction to cocaine, LSD and the depressant Percodan, and with many decades of therapy behind her (she said that therapy has been “my only serious relationship”), she was better placed to confront the effect on her of that messy public separation. She admitted to a fear, in the wake of her father’s abandonment of her mother, that her own partners would always leave her—“so I leave first because I can’t face that.” And amid her frankness about her own drug habit, she revealed the extent to which she had inherited it from her father, with whom she admitted having taken cocaine. “He shot crystal meth for 13 years, which is probably why he spent the last three years of his life in bed,” she said.



‘Who cares if we spill champagne on the carpet?’ … Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library

From her first moments of life, she was in the public eye – a photograph taken of her when she was only two hours old appeared in Life. She was performing at the bar mitzvahs of school friends by the time she was 13; this attracted the attention of her mother, who incorporated her in the nightclub act she was touring at the time. At 18, she had a small but eye-catching part in the 1975 satire Shampoo, where she was called upon to proposition Warren Beatty with the words: “Wanna fuck?”



It was around this time that Cadell came across her at Central one day. “She was a year or two below me,” she recalls. “I found her in tears in the cloakroom. There had been some kind of party the night before where everyone had misbehaved. People tended to exploit her because she was so wealthy. In the student world, not many people could afford to throw those sorts of parties and so people would get very drunk and the attitude would be, ‘well, who cares if we spill champagne on the carpet or push the grand piano out of the window.’ I sympathised with her and I think she found that unusual. I didn’t know about her background when I was smoothing her ruffled feathers. She never played a grand game or pulled rank. She was just a lovely person with this amazing sense of humour. And she was immensely generous. She paid for me to come out to stay with her in the US when I had absolutely no money. We think of sharp, witty people as being very resilient but she had a striking softness and vulnerability.”



Even a life growing up with celebrity parents couldn’t quite prepare Fisher for the media storm surrounding Star Wars. Soon after that, she fell in with the Saturday Night Live crowd of livewire comics – she dated Dan Aykroyd, became fast friends with John Belushi, who died of a drugs overdose in 1982, and starred with both of them in The Blues Brothers. Having met the singer Paul Simon when she was 21, she married him five years later; two years after that, they were divorced. She was married again in 1991, to the Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for another man after three-and-a-half years and one daughter.



Fisher with Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/DISNEY/LUCASFILM

She had turned to drugs in her early 20s not to make life more exciting but to moderate it. Drugs, she said in 1993, “managed something in me that I was too lazy to manage on my own, this thundering emotion and verbal excitement that would roar out of me. It still can: I can still take a dinner party hostage but I try not to.” She has told many stories about how drug-taking spilled onto the Star Wars movies. “We did cocaine on the set of Empire, on the ice planet,” she said, while taking care to point out that “Luke Skywalker was drunk too.” If all addicts have to hit bottom, then Fisher’s was her overdose in 1985. “Leading up to the overdose I’d been taking drugs for three solid months.” She found herself in rehab in the aftermath. A fellow patient told her: “I was in San Quentin.” Fisher replied: “And I was in Star Wars.”



Anyone expecting a hard-luck story from Postcards from the Edge, the extraordinary first novel that came out of this experience a few years later, would have been pleasantly surprised. This was no “fuck-ups of the rich and famous”, to use Fisher’s expression, but a sharply witty and illuminating inventory of a life gone astray. It charts the recovery of a drug-addicted actor named Suzanne Vale, who shares Fisher’s lightning wit and megawatt personality, though the author claimed she was based “only 50 percent” on herself.

The actor Simon Callow was in Mike Nichols’s 1991 film version, scripted by Fisher. “I met her at the first table-reading of the screenplay,” he says. “She was this very chic, petite, mad, amusingly off-the-wall figure. Very nervous, of course, because this group of wonderful actors – Meryl Streep, Shirley Maclaine, Gene Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss – was reading aloud her first screenplay. But it worked, wonderfully well. Then when we shot the film a month later, she was on set every day as far as I know, hanging out with Meryl, who was basically playing her. It was hard when you looked over at them to know which one was more like Carrie.”



In the late 1980s and 1990s, Fisher settled into being a writer. She published other novels, including Surrender the Pink, inspired by her relationship with Simon. She also became an uncredited “script doctor”, polishing and rewriting screenplays (among them The River Wild, The Wedding Singer and Sister Act) for small fortunes, though she insisted jokingly on being referred to as “a script nurse. And I want the outfit too.” There have been other screen roles since the Star Wars series: Hannah and Her Sisters, When Harry Met Sally, the abrasive Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe and David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, in which she played herself. But the acting slowed to a trickle long ago. “She’s an incredibly gifted as writer and raconteur,” says Cadel, “but I would like to have seen her do more acting. Then again, it was probably quite hard to cast her. She wasn’t some dumb brunette. She was always more unusual and brilliant than that.”



It’s comforting to think that however many box-office records The Force Awakens breaks, it won’t temper Fisher’s insouciance one jot. And the responsibility of promoting the blockbuster of the decade hasn’t taught her to be any more on-message than usual, thank goodness. She revealed recently the studio’s stipulation that she lose 35lbs before returning to play Leia. “I’m in an industry where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up.” And her recent TV chat show appearances, many featuring her French bulldog Gary (who has his own Instagram account) panting alongside her, have been as batty as ever. Disney executives must hold their breath whenever she goes on live TV.



But no matter how cool it might seem to be part of the Star Wars franchise, it has nothing on the job of being Carrie Fisher. Though she will never have another part as memorable or popular as Princess Leia, she will always be infinitely more complex and compelling off-screen than anything a scriptwriter could conceive.

Carrie Fisher: fact file

Born 21 October 1956, Beverly Hills, California.

Career After singing onstage with her mother, the actor Debbie Reynolds, Fisher got her first film role seducing Warren Beatty in Shampoo, followed several years later by one of the leads in the science-fiction swashbuckler Star Wars and its sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. She could be heard mourning the lot of her character: “She lost her parents and her planet in the first film. In the second film, a very close friend loses his hand and her first boyfriend becomes frozen. By now Leia must be exhausted. She’s probably ready to say, ‘Hey guys, I can’t handle this any more. I’m going to get my hair done.’” Nevertheless, she’s back in the seventh and latest chapter, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

High point Writing her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Postcards From the Edge, and adapting it for the film version starring Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale, a star fresh out of rehab. Asked why she didn’t play the part herself, Fisher responded: “I’ve already played Suzanne.”

Low point Having her stomach pumped after a drugs overdose in 1985.

They say: “She is crazy brilliant. It’s an amazing thing, her sort of free-associative mind, her ability to find humour in anything – she’s like a divining rod for wordplay. She’s incredible.” JJ Abrams, director Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

She says: “I’m Joan of Narc, patron saint of addicts.”