After decades of fast living that her fearless Star Wars character Princess Leia would have struggled to keep up with, Carrie Fisher knows a thing or two about life.
The American actress has been given an advice column by The Guardian, with young readers encouraged to disclose their personal problems, while she will impart lessons learnt from her years of drug addiction and mental illness.
The 59-year-old promised in her first column on Friday to “provide solicited advice, based on a life filled with pratfalls and accidents” but added that she wanted the questions to come “from the younger members of our congested world.”
Fisher was catapulted to worldwide stardom as rebel warrior Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, which has been a cultural phenomenon since the release of the films from 1977 to 1983.
Steeped in Hollywood excess from an early age, she was the product of the four-year marriage of movie star Debbie Reynolds, best-known for her role in Singin’ In The Rain, and singer Eddie Fisher.
The relationship, and the happy home in Beverly Hills, came to an end when Fisher left Reynolds for her close friend, the actress Elizabeth Taylor.
Fisher is also known for her searingly honest semi-autobiographical novels, including her best-selling debut Postcards from the Edge, which she turned into a film of the same name in 1990.
She has given various interviews over the years about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder and addiction to prescription drugs and to cocaine, which she admitted using on the set of The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
She has also discussed being treated with electroconvulsive therapy, in which small electric currents are passed through the brain, to trigger brief seizures.
Fisher tells her readers that addictions, heartbreak, mental illness amount to a “fair share of challenging and unhappy experiences.”
“Over time, I’ve paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I’ve gone through. But I’ll rifle through the half I recall and lay it at your feet.”
Fisher follows a grand tradition in the agony pages of The Guardian, which has also given columns to Molly Ringwald, star of The Breakfast Club (1985) and Canadian singer Alanis Morissette.
Her memoir, The Princess Diarist, is set for release in October and is based on diaries she kept while filming the Star Wars trilogy.
