It seems not even Princess Leia is good enough for the standards of Hollywood. A friend of Carrie Fisher recently revealed the actress was pressured into losing weight for her return to the Star Wars universe.
It’s no secret that Hollywood has unrealistic beauty standards, especially when it comes to women’s bodies. However, it seems not even the prestige of Star Wars is able to ward off these expectations. Singer James Blunt, who was a friend of Carrie Fisher’s, revealed the actress was pressured to lose weight for her return as Princess Leia.
“I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house,” Blunt explained at UK’s Hay Festival. “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,” He concluded. “They say it was heart failure of some kind, but she had taken enough drugs to have a really good party.”
While it’s impossible to tell what exactly led to Carrie Fisher’s tragic passing, it’s a shame to learn that such a beloved actress was pressured to hold her body to a certain standard in her final days. Regardless of how she was seen by Hollywood, Star Wars fans will always remember Fisher as Princess Leia, not because of her body, but because of the inspiration she gave to fans across the world.
The Pressure Of Women In Star Wars
Carrie Fisher is far from the only woman who experienced adverse health effects due to her role in Star Wars. Daisy Ridley recently spoke out about how the stress of handling her sudden fame made her physically ill, only recovering from the worry and anxiety by the end of the trilogy.
“Oh, God! Essentially, it was a leaky gut,” Ridley told The Times. “I was just knackered. I’d never travelled that much, or done press junkets, and my body deals with stress in a very physical way, so my gut was manifesting an emotional reaction to travelling around the world, people saying hello to me in the street.”
“And me going, ‘What’s going on?’ And worrying. ‘Oh s–t, should it be me?’ or ‘Am I good enough?’ And I only really felt I was by the third film, The Rise of Skywalker. By then, I felt, ‘OK, I was chosen for a reason.’ But it took a long time. It was super intense.”
Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in the Star Wars universe, was infamously bullied off social media due to the harassment she experienced at the hands of fans. Even in the biggest franchises, it’s clear women face an unimaginable amount of stress both from inside and outside of the industry. These experiences, from Carrie Fisher to Daisy Ridley, should constantly be remembered as a cautionary tale about public perception in Hollywood.
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Source: The Independent
