I’ll never stop missing her. Um, but I’m just grateful we had her for as long as we did. There is a moment at Star Wars Celebration that no one who was in that room has forgotten. Mark Hamill walked onto the stage to pay tribute to his closest friend, Carrie Fiser. At 74, Mark is still telling the truth about Carrie.
And the truth, it turns out, is bigger and stranger and more irreplaceable than even the galaxy far, far away that brought them together. You probably know Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, the blue-eyed farm boy who became the last hope of a rebellion and one of the most recognizable faces in cinema history. But before the lightsaber and the white tunic, he was just a kid who couldn’t stay in one place long enough to figure out what he wanted to be.
He was born on September 25th, 1951 in Oakland, California, the fourth of seven children in a family held together by the schedule of the United States Navy. His father, William Thomas Hamill, was a Navy captain, which meant the family moved constantly, California, New York, Virginia, and eventually Japan, where Mark graduated from Nile C.
Kinnick High School on a US military base in Yakoska in 1969. He was president of the student council and a member of the drama club. His father wanted him to join the Navy. Mark wanted to act. They clashed over comic books, over fantasy movies, over the particular direction the boy’s imagination kept pulling him.
The Navy captain and his son, who wanted to tell stories. It was a tension that would take years to fully resolve. After high school, Mark moved back to California and enrolled in drama at Los Angeles City College, working multiple jobs, including as a janitor, to pay his bills. He was not an overnight success.
His early career was a patient accumulation of small television roles, a guest appearance on the Bill Cosby Show, a recurring part on General Hospital, the short-lived sitcom The Texas Wheelers. He was cast as the oldest son in the pilot episode of 8 is Enough, a role that seemed like it might be his breakthrough, only for a different opportunity to arrive before the show went to series.
His agent had set up an audition for a low-budget science fiction film with the working title The Adventures of Luke Stariller. It was directed by a man named George Lucas who had made American Graffiti and was now attempting something that nobody in Hollywood quite understood. During his screen test, Mark thought he was playing a sidekick to Harrison Ford’s character and wasn’t entirely sure the film was supposed to be a comedy.
He has described reading the script and genuinely struggling to make sense of what he was looking at. a galaxy with its own rules, its own language, its own complete and self-contained mythology that Lucas had assembled with an obsessive thoroughess. Mark dropped out of 8 is enough, took the role of Luke Skywalker, and flew to England to begin production on a film that nobody expected to change the world.
He was 24 years old. And on December 30th, 1975, at an audition in Los Angeles, where Brian Dealma was simultaneously casting his horror film Carrie in the same building, Mark Hamill first sat across from a 19-year-old girl named Carrie Fiser to do a chemistry read for the role of Princess Leia. He has described that first meeting with the precision that tells you he has replayed it many times.
He had arranged dinner with her beforehand, just the two of them, before cameras, before the weight of what they were both about to become had settled on either of their shoulders. He has said in nearly every interview where the subject has come up that he was completely unprepared for the person he met. She seemed so much wiser than her years, he told Variety.
Very funny, very spontaneous, very witty. At the Star Wars Celebration tribute, he was even more direct. I was bowled over by her humor and her wit, and how sardonic she was, how dark she was. I’m still not thinking of her in past tense. Carrie Fischer was not a person who arrived gently. She was the daughter of two of America’s most famous entertainers, singer Eddie Fischer and actress Debbie Reynolds, and she had been living in the blast radius of celebrity since before she could walk.
Her father had left her mother for Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was 2 years old, turning her family into one of Hollywood’s earliest tabloid scandals and giving Carrie a front row education in the way that fame and love can destroy each other when they occupy the same space. She had made her film debut at 17 in Shampoo, playing a precociously seductive character opposite Warren Batty.
She had already by 19 developed the sharp, sardonic, deeply self-aware humor that she would carry for the rest of her life. The armor that looked like wit and sometimes was. Mark met her at exactly the right moment for both of them. He was 24 and hungry and still figuring out who he was beneath the ambition. She was 19 and already more fully formed than most people twice her age and already carrying wounds that she would spend decades learning to live with.
From the first dinner, he has said she was disarmingly candid about her life, about her father’s addictions, about her parents’ divorce, about the particular loneliness of growing up in a family where the private pain was always threatening to become public property. She talked about it all with a directness that most people in that industry never managed because the industry rewarded discretion.
and Carrie Fischer had decided that directness was more interesting. They filmed Star Wars in England in 1976. The set was by all accounts a strange and pressured environment. Lucas, famously quiet and uncommunicative, the dialogue clunky in ways that the actors were constantly trying to smooth. the sheer scale of the production creating a kind of collective disorientation that nobody had quite prepared for.
In the middle of all of this, Mark and Carrie and Harrison Ford found each other. Mark has said that the three of them were not particularly close during production. The real bond developed afterward once the film was released and they discovered simultaneously what they had become. But even during filming, something was forming.
They ate meals together. They talked. And at some point, as Mark has admitted with the sheepishness of a man who knows exactly how it sounds, things briefly got complicated. Sometimes, you know, we sort of wanted to go in that direction, he said at the tribute panel with the careful understatement of someone navigating a story about a person he is honoring on the pretext of talking about kissing techniques.
Oh, I’m a pretty good kisser. Oh, I think I’m a better kisser. Cut to us making out like a couple of horny teenagers. He paused for the laughter, then delivered the line that tells you everything about how their friendship actually worked. What really cooled it was the fact that at some point we both started laughing. Believe me, it kills your passion if someone’s laughing in your face.
But I thought we dodged a bullet there because we had the fun without any of the responsibility. That laugh, that shared, simultaneous, completely unstoppable laugh at the worst possible moment, that was the thing that defined them for the next 40 years. Marcus said that making Carrie Fischer laugh was a badge of honor.
That he measured his success in any given interaction by whether or not he could crack her. And she was not easy to crack. She was funnier than almost everyone she knew. And she had seen enough of the world to be genuinely hard to surprise. When he got her, really got her, it was like winning something worth winning.
Star Wars was released in May 1977 and changed everything immediately and permanently. Mark was 25 years old and one of the most famous people on earth before he had quite processed what had happened. He has talked about the particular disorientation of that level of sudden fame. the way it reorganizes your relationship to ordinary life so completely that for a while you don’t know how to be a normal person anymore.
Carrie, he has said, navigated it differently. She was the first of the three of them to understand that the good far outweighed the bad. She embraced the conventions, the fans, the signings, the strange intimate relationship that the character of Leia had created between her and millions of people who felt genuinely that she belonged to them. She reveled in it.
Mark told Variety she was true Hollywood royalty and she knew it. He was less sure of himself. He has described trying through the 1980s to establish that he had a career beyond Luke Skywalker, taking theater roles on Broadway, playing Mozart in Amadeus, playing the lead in The Elephant Man, trying to prove to directors and to himself that he was an actor of range and depth who happened to have been in a very successful science fiction film.
When he auditioned for the feature film adaptation of Amadeus, the director Milos Foreman was blunt. Oh, no, no, no. The Luke Skywalker is not to be being the Mozart. Mark found it funny and deflating in equal measure. Carrie had no patience for this self-doubt. She attended a Broadway production he was in and noticed when she picked up the play bill that his biography listed various theater credits and concluded with the phrase, “He is also known for a series of popular space movies.
” She found him afterward and asked with the directness that was her signature, “What’s the deal? How come you didn’t mention Star Wars?” He explained about wanting to be taken seriously as a theater actor. She looked at him steadily and said, “Hey, get over yourself.” He has credited that conversation many times over the years as the one that reoriented him, that put his relationship to Luke Skywalker and to the franchise and to the fans in a perspective he could actually live with.
She was someone who sorted him out, he has said, who put things in perspective when he had lost it. She had also survived things during those years that he watched from the side and could only partially understand. her battles with addiction, with prescription drugs, with alcohol, with the self-medication that so many people in that industry use to manage the gap between what they feel and what they are supposed to perform were documented eventually in the memoirs she wrote with a frankness that startled even people who thought they
knew her. She had been briefly engaged to Dan Akroyd. She had married Paul Simon in 1983 and divorced him in 1984 and then dated him again afterward because the feelings did not obey the legal calendar. She had been in and out of psychiatric care, grappling with bipolar disorder in an era when the public conversation around mental health was far less evolved than it is today.
She wrote about all of it in Postcards from the Edge in 1987, in Wishful Drinking in 2008, in Shockaholic in 2011. Not to expose herself, but because she believed that honesty about these things was a form of service that other people living with the same battles needed someone to stand up and name them. Mark watched this from the particular vantage point of the person who knew her longest in the industry.
He has described her advocacy for mental health awareness with a reverence that makes clear he understood it as one of the most significant things she ever did. that he ranked it alongside her performances, alongside the memoirs, alongside the speaking tours where she stood in front of audiences and said the things about depression and addiction and the relationship between public image and private reality that people desperately needed to hear.
“She made you feel when you were in her presence like you were her best friend,” he said at the tribute. She was so laser focused on you, so engaging that it was exhilarating to be around her. The thing she had about her that no one else could match was she made you feel like you were her best friend.
And then part of me did fall in love with her. I think every guy that she met, Dan Akroyd has told me stories, Paul Simon has told me stories. She had you under her spell. There were years of distance between them in the long gap when the original trilogy was finished and the sequel trilogy had not yet been announced. Mark moved to theater, to voice acting, to the work that kept him busy and occasionally brilliantly employed without requiring him to be Luke Skywalker.
His marriage to Mary Lou York, a dental hygienist he married in 1978. In a partnership that has lasted nearly half a century and produced three children, Nathan, Griffin, and Chelsea kept him grounded in ways that fame never could. He has described Marylu as the anchor that allowed everything else to function.
When he was at his most lost professionally and personally, she was steady. When Disney announced in 2012 that a new Star Wars trilogy was coming and that the original cast would return, Mark’s immediate reaction was complicated. He has been honest about this. He was not sure he wanted to go back.
He was not sure Luke Skywalker was something he had more to say about. and he was not sure at 61 years old what it would feel like to step back into the white tunic and the lightsaber after 30 years away. What made him say yes in the end was partly Carrie. He has said it in several interviews that talking to her about it, hearing her enthusiasm, watching the way she leaped at the chance to be Leia again with the same joy she had brought to it in 1977 reminded him of what the whole thing had meant.
That she was still at 56 years old the person who understood what they had been given and who refused to be ungrateful for it. She was excited about The Force Awakens in a way that was completely unguarded and completely infectious. And when they were on set together again after 30 years, it felt, he has said, like no time had passed. They were Luke and Leia, yes, but they were also Mark and Carrie, still finishing each other’s sentences.
On December 23rd, 2016, Carrie Fischer suffered a cardiac arrest aboard a flight from London to Los Angeles. Mark was in the middle of filming The Last Jedi. The news reached him in the way that terrible news reaches people suddenly, without preparation, in the middle of an ordinary working day. He posted on Twitter immediately, as if 2016 couldn’t get any worse.
Sending all our love to it, Carrie Fiser. He held on to hope for 4 days, posting updates, invoking the force, doing the thing that people do when they cannot accept that the worst is really happening. On December 27th, 2016, Carrie Fiser died. She was 60 years old. His wife came into the bedroom with tears rolling down her face.
He has started to tell that story in public more than once and been unable to finish it. He has described it as the moment when the news stopped being news and became real. When the abstract fact became the specific irreplaceable loss of this specific person who had been in his life since he was 24 years old. He told the celebration audience 4 months later, “I have been trying to deal with this.
You know, there are the five stages of grief, and just when I think I’ve gotten to acceptance, I bounce back to anger because I’m mad. She should be here.” He had been going back and forth between grief and fury for months and would continue to for years. In 2024, at a fan convention in Chicago, he became emotional, describing the moment his wife delivered the news, trailing off mid-sentence, unable to complete it.
He told the crowd, “It forever altered how I reacted to Star Wars in general. The heart was gone. I don’t talk about it because I don’t like reliving it.” The Last Jedi, which was dedicated to her memory, required him to process his own grief publicly and on camera simultaneously to complete a film that contained her final performance as Leia while carrying the knowledge that she was gone.
He has said that watching her in the finished film is still every time an ambush, that he knows it’s coming and it still catches him. She had once told him what she wanted him to do at her funeral. If you go first, I’ll heckle your funeral, she said. She asked him to do the same for her. He didn’t.
He stood on a stage in Orlando in April 2017 and told stories and read from a statement and choked up in front of thousands of people who loved her. And he didn’t heckle, he honored her. because that is what you do when the person who was supposed to be immortal is suddenly permanently gone. He did however hold on to one image of her.
He shared it at the end of the tribute to close the hour. “When I think of her,” he said, she’s looking down from the celestial stratosphere with those big brown eyes, that sly smile on her face as she lovingly extends me the middle finger. And that’s how I want you to think of her. That was Carrie. At 74, Mark Hamill continues to honor her in the ways available to him when she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in May 2023.
He was there reading from the statement he had written in 2016 that she was our princess, damn it, and adding in his own voice. But everything would have been so much drabber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was. I’ll never stop missing her, but I’m so thankful we had her as long as we did. I’m grateful for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness, and even the bratty, self-indulgent crap my beloved space twin drove me crazy with through the years. So, thank you, Carrie.
I love you. That is the truth Mark Hamill tells about Carrie Fischer. Not a polished tribute for a stage in an audience, though he has given those two, but the unpolished version, the one where he can’t finish the sentence about his wife coming into the bedroom, the one where he bounces between acceptance and anger because she should be here.
The one where he closes his eyes and sees her in the celestial stratosphere. Those big brown eyes, that sly smile, the middle finger extended with enormous affection. That was Carrie. If this story moved you, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on those notifications so you never miss a story like this.
Leave us a comment below. What is your favorite Carrie Fisher moment, on screen or off? We would love to hear from you. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one.
