Happy Birthday to Carrie Fisher!

Princess Leia was only the beginning.

The Star Wars trilogy made Carrie Fisher a star when she was just out of teens and her life has been a giant saga of ups and downs.

The daughter of movie star Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher had already experienced plenty of drama with her dad leaving her mom for Elizabeth Taylor in the late 50s when Carrie was just a baby.

After Carrie became a star in her own right, she married and divorced Paul Simon, married, had a child with, then divorced Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd who is now openly gay.

Carrie did more movies like The Blues Brothers and When Harry Met Sally but her real talent was in writing as we found out with her sensational novel Postcards From the Edge which was later made into a film from her screenplay and starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

Through it all, Carrie has struggled with addictions and mental illness and yet managed to keep her sense of humor and write about it all. She even wrote a book and made a Broadway show about it all called Wishful Drinking that will air on HBO soon.

At the TV Critics Association Summer Press Tour where Carrie was promoting the HBO special she told us:  “What I realized that when I got sober, overdosed, went to a mental hospital – all these things – it went in the paper. And my thing is: “Wait a second, if it’s going to be out there, please let my version be in it. ” Also, there is the saying, ‘You’re only as sick as your secrets. If you can claim it, it has very little power over you. I want to live on one side of the magnifying glass or the other – on the side that makes big things small or small things big. And I live on the side that makes big things small. You meet a better class of people there.”

“When the things happened at the time, I was too ashamed to talk about them so there’s great relief in just sort of being able to own this – something that happened, that I learned from and wasn’t defeated by. And if I can do that – and some of the stuff was really hard – then anybody can do it.”

I’m sure there were times that Carrie never thought she’d make it to her 54th birthday but she has and is proving herself to be a real survivor just like her mom.

Happy birthday Carrie!