In terms of roles, Carrie Fisher may be best known as Princess Leia, but her very last role was in Sharon Horgan's Catastrophe, during which they became close friends. In a stunning essay published in The Guardian, Horgan wrote what she called a "love letter" to Fisher—although, as Horgan explained, it's hard to write a a love letter "to someone who was allergic to bullshit."

Horgan explained that she and co-creator Rob Delaney were "desperate" to get Carrie on Catastrophe, and when they did, they treated her "as an icon, not a real human." For this reason, it took a while to become friends, but eventually, they started to become close:

"When she came to my house in Hackney, we sat on a sofa with our dogs and talked about everything. Mainly her life... There was pain there, and responsibility, and her own demons. It added up to a head full of aggravation, as well as incredible anecdotes. I asked her when she ever got to have a moment of normal. She pointed at me and then back at herself on the sofa and said: 'Doing this.'"

The night before the infamous flight that led to Fisher's heart attack, she and Horgan had dinner with Salman Rushdie and Gary the dog. "...[S]he cared enough to make sure I was having fun," Horgan wrote. "And that was her wont. If she felt she was talking about herself too much, she would say, 'Wait! What about you? We haven't talked about you.'"

Horgan also wrote that Fisher was "so real that it was almost dangerous":

"Actually, it was dangerous. Because she didn't play the game...My God, girls, we owe her a lot. Not many women of her generation called out the double standards of the film industry the way she did. And how it treats women of a certain age. She knew that a man in her position wouldn't have got the flak that she got. And he didn't. She knew that she had to keep mouthing off about it."

Read the whole article here.

From: Esquire US