Carrie Fisher was an American film and stage actor, novelist, screenwriter, and script doctor born in Beverly Hills on October 21, 1956.

The daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, she pursued her education at the Professional Children's School, Beverly Hills High School, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, a range of institutions that reflected both her performing arts background and her literary ambitions. She worked across film, television, stage, and voice acting throughout her career, and also served as a film producer. Her facility with language extended to French as well as English, and her work as a script doctor placed her behind the scenes on productions beyond her own credited roles.

Fisher first played Princess Leia in the original Star Wars films, a role she originated in 1977 and continued through 1983. She returned to the character in The Force Awakens in 2015, reprising the role more than three decades after her initial appearance. Alongside her screen work, she pursued a parallel career as a novelist and playwright, contributing to multiple areas of literary production. She received the Disney Legends award in recognition of her association with the Star Wars franchise. Her television work also drew formal recognition: she received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, the first for her performance in 30 Rock in 2007 and the second for her work in Catastrophe, a nomination that came in 2017, after her death on December 27, 2016, at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center.

Fisher's body of work spans several distinct disciplines — acting across film, television, stage, and voice performance; producing; screenwriting; script doctoring; novel writing; and playwriting — making her one of the more formally diverse figures to have emerged from a Hollywood family background. Her recurring presence in both comedic television and large-scale franchise filmmaking defined much of her later public profile.