Well, the cat is out of the bag. The moggy in question may be knocking on for 40, and the bag is coming apart at the seams, but no matter: the story can finally be told. In 1976, during the filming of Star Wars, Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, and Harrison Ford, who was Han Solo, crossed over to the Dark Side and – according to Fisher’s new memoir – had a three-month affair. She was 19 with a stormy Hollywood upbringing behind her and a fledgling drug habit; he was a 33-year-old former carpenter who was married with two children. According to People magazine, to whom Fisher gave an interview ahead of the publication of her new memoir, The Princess Diarist, it is the news “that die-hard fans have wished for since Han Solo and Princess Leia captured hearts on screen”.

This might be an overstatement. It is unlikely that millions of Star Wars disciples have been monitoring the press for the last four decades for an indication that their idols had once been an item. (“Still nothing?” asks the patient wife of a fiftysomething Star Wars enthusiast as he slams the newspaper down on the breakfast table yet again.) Even so, there is a frisson whenever a fictional relationship spills off the edges of the screen like ale into an overfilled tankard.

Fisher and Ford on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Lucasfilm

The sexual chemistry between Han and Leia always represented the only authentically adult component of the Star Wars series – and that includes the most recent instalment, The Force Awakens, in which the pair were touchingly reunited. So there is a bizarre vindication to the discovery that it wasn’t merely for the cameras. You almost want to shout: “I knew it!”



But why? Actors are paid to pretend. It’s what they’re good at. Our need to know that it wasn’t really fake, and that we can believe fully in what we saw on screen, suggests either a childlike faith in fantasy (so it was real after all!) or a determination not to be taken for fools (they won’t pull the wool over my eyes!). Revelations like the one about “Carrison” don’t alter the performances. Rather, it’s the romantic equivalent of finding out that an actor really did his or her own stunts. That it wasn’t CGI. That there was risk involved. It mattered.



Insights into what happened on set, whether they take the form of nerdy making-of documentaries or salacious tittle-tattle, give us an illusion of intimacy with our idols and enrich the texture of the films we watch. And goodness knows, Star Wars can do with all the enriching it can get. The next time we see the movie, it will be augmented by what we have learned about Ford and Fisher. This won’t make it a better or worse film, and it won’t complicate our experience of it (as darker revelations, such as Tippi Hedren’s recent claim that Hitchcock sexually abused her during the making of The Birds and Marnie, have complicated those pictures). But it will, at best, provide additional context and a smattering of footnotes.



Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not would always have become a masterpiece, even if Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had not fallen in love while making it. That they did merely introduces a new prism through which to watch their scenes. So this is what love looks like, we might think, flattering ourselves that we can tell the bona fide from the bogus. Knowing what came next – that Bogart and Bacall remained a couple until the former’s death 13 years later – gives us a privileged foresight and an extra level of emotional investment that could never have been planned or predicted by the film-makers. At the opposite end of the quality spectrum, Cleopatra doesn’t become watchable simply because it brought Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton together for the first of two marriages to each another. But it does mark it out as something other than a kitsch disasterpiece. Burton was 14 years into his marriage to Sybil Williams when he fell for Taylor, who was hitched at the time to Eddie Fisher – Carrie’s dad, no less. Small world.

Extracurricular activities don’t change what’s on screen one jot. Mr & Mrs Smith is not better than it might otherwise have been simply because it marked the birth of Brangelina, any more than By the Sea is more profound because it foretold Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s demise. At the very least, these matters can be a public relations boon. The new wartime thriller Allied may find a bigger audience than it might ordinarily have done now that it is rumoured to be the film that tore the couple apart. Rumours of an affair between its stars, Pitt and Marion Cotillard, have been comprehensively denied but that doesn’t enter into it. Smoke is good box office. Fire is neither here nor there.

• Read an interview with Carrie Fisher and an exclusive extract from The Princess Diarist in Guardian Weekend magazine on Saturday, and on theguardian.com from Sunday

