"Wishful Drinking", Carrie Fisher's hit stage production of the intoxicating autobiographical tale of her life combines archival footage with her one-woman stage performance, which was taped in June before a live audience.
An actress, screenwriter and bestselling author ("Postcards from the Edge," "The Best Awful" and ""Wishful Drinking""), Carrie Fisher is the daughter of the late singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, known as "America's Sweethearts" in the late '50s. She became a cultural icon at age 19 after starring as Princess Leia in the first "Star Wars" trilogy in the 1970s.
Despite growing up with "Hollywood royalty" and experiencing early fame of her own, Fisher's life had its challenges, as she reveals in this uproarious and sobering account. Combining wry wit and raw facts, "Wishful Drinking" reveals her own hilarious slant on the not-so-glittering side of being a celebrity. It's a show where she's circling the drain singing.
From stardom to divorce, re-marriage to the death of a close friend, addiction to mental illness, Fisher recounts her peaks and valleys with unfailing candor and biting humor, referring to celebrity as just "obscurity biding its time."
In "Wishful Drinking", Fisher details her complicated yet eclectic extended family tree in Hollywood Inbreeding 101, employing a blackboard and wooden pointer. Her father Eddie Fisher's very public affair with Elizabeth Taylor ended what had been perceived and celebrated as a "storybook marriage," and she and her brother Todd later watched both her mother's and father's "once white-hot bright star of celebrity slowly dim, cool and fade."
In 1973, at her mother's urging, the 17-year-old Fisher enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London; two years later, her life changed forever when she donned a white dress as Princess Leia in George Lucas' "Star Wars."