I watched Star Wars again last night. The original, 1977 one. At the end, Carrie Fisher gets equal billing with her co-stars, and in an action sci-fi movie.

That didn’t happen much to women on screen at that time. It still doesn’t.

Nobody knew how big Star Wars was going to be; Fisher herself referred to working on George Lucas’s franchise debut as a “goofy little three-month hangout with robots”. But, even at 19, it was clear that this female lead was never going to be a glamorous add-on to a couple of blokes with guns.

Nor was Fisher overly impressed by the role, which put her unsmiling face on posters around the world. “A lot of it was just running down corridors,” she once commented. And yet to girls and women the world over she was a lot more than just a princess with a belted white gown and that hilarious hairdo; she was every bit Skywalker and Solo’s equal, a sassy woman who referred to Chewbacca as a ‘walking carpet’ and yet whose plaintive cry as a hologram “Help me, Obi-Wan!” remains the beating heart of the movie.

Born into Hollywood royalty, she could have spent her life in the shadow of her mother Debbie Reynolds or her father Eddie Fisher (who went on to marry Liz Taylor). She could have been defined by her upbringing and her starry world. This was a woman who was engaged to Dan Aykroyd. Who married Paul Simon. Who promoted Star Wars in a gold bikini.

Carrie Fisher shuts down reporter asking about her weight

And yet Fisher never let her upbringing or the growing madness of celebrity culture have the upper hand. She developed her voice as a writer, delivered several caustic novels and then the brilliant semi-biographical Postcards From The Edge, which stands as perhaps the definitive mirror of the absurd LA fishbowl. All this while coping with bipolar disorder. She was a self-deprecating Hollywood star who had the vanishingly rare ability to stand back, say it as it was and accurately analyse the world created by movies; she had a proper, acknowledged literary gift; she was one of the first celebrities to see the madness of fame with clear-eyed, unsentimental wit.

She also personally challenged the way women are forced to appear – still – on screen. Apparently told to lose a couple of stone prior to her return to Star Wars in The Force Awakens, she wryly commented: “They don’t want to hire all of me – only about three quarters.”

Yet her enduring power as Princess Leia is such that, in that film, when she steps from the ship to meet Hans Solo, cinema audiences all over the world burst into tears. Perhaps partly from nostalgia, yes, but maybe also from relief that here at last was a female Hollywood star in middle age who was content to appear as such, and to not insist on having every single wrinkle airbrushed out.

Carrie Fisher: Fans mourn Star Wars heroine

Perhaps her legacy will be to encourage female stars that it is actually alright to look like a normal woman both on screen and on the red carpet. That you don’t have to turn up on chat shows and repeat a carefully honed mantra created by your PR team. That it is appropriate to analyse and challenge.