James Blunt – yes, that James Blunt – has claimed Disney and Lucasfilm pressured Carrie Fisher to be thin for the Star Wars sequels she was set to star in, and in doing so contributed to her death – and he’s not the only one.
Blunt is one of the most recent of Carrie’s friends to publicly speak out about what happened ahead of the late actor’s heart failure that inevitably led to her death.
Blunt recently told audience members at the UK’s Hay Festival (via SFFGazette.com):
“I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house. And she’d been really mistreating her body, and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in a new Star Wars movie.
So she was really on a high and a positive, but they had applied a lot of pressure on her to be thin. She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not in film and TV.
And she really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and by the time she got on the plane, she had effectively killed herself. They say it was heart failure of some kind, but she had taken enough drugs to have a really good party.”
It’s no secret that Fisher had struggled with substance abuse throughout her life, but people who were close to the actor strongly believe the pressure put on Fisher was a big contributing factor to her death.
Fisher’s career was launched when she shot to fame in 1977, having starred in the first Star Wars film as Princess Leia. Having read her autobiography, I know that she felt a bit of pressure to lose weight for the first role, but wasn’t pulled up too much for her weight at the time.
I’m really sad, but not surprised, to hear that nothing’s really moved on since the ’70s, and societal pressure on women to look a certain way is still very much felt. In fact, a recent statistic from the Economist stated it’s still economically more viable for women to be thin today.
I feel that pressure myself, have grown up with that pressure, and I’ve just recently worked on an art project detailing my past eating disorder. Maybe that makes me more sensitive, but I’m actually quite angry hearing about the details that caused the person most affectionately known as ‘Space Mom’ to lose her life prematurely.
Blunt wrote in his autobiography that Fisher’s daughter maintains that he’s partly responsible for her passing. Here’s what he said about that:
Charlie, her best friend, confronted her more directly and told her she needed to quit drugs. I took a different approach and did them with her, pretending to myself that I would guide her to redemption one day – just not today. As a result, her daughter Billie blames me in part for her death, and no longer speaks to me.
Source: GeekTyrant
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