Somehow, Carrie Fisher never got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was a legit icon, you think she would have gotten one either sometime during her initial run with Star Wars in the 1970s and 80s, or during her return to the franchise in the 2010s.
Studios often pay for the star—they’re bought, not gifted—and time the ceremony with press for a new project, so I was surprised when I realized Fisher didn’t already have her name on a sidewalk in LA. Seems like Disney would have sprung for one back then. She’s got one now, though, over six years since her death, and whew, it’s a whole THING.
That the Fisher family is dramatic is not surprising, they’re good old-fashioned Hollywood drama from way back. But the way it’s going down now is a little extra, mainly because Billie Lourd, Carrie’s only child, is typically NOT a drama queen. She’s a cinematic chaos queen, but off screen, Billie keeps her head down and isn’t frequently photographed or seen stirring up nonsense around town. Her marriage last year got a little ink, she’s had a couple kids in the last few years, too, and she occasionally pops up in real estate news—she’s renovating the joint Debbie Reynolds-Carrie Fisher properties—but other than that, she’s pretty quiet between gigs.
Her mother’s Walk of Fame ceremony blew up this week, though. It was held yesterday (on “Star Wars Day” because “May the FOURTH be with you”), and Billie attended along with her husband, Austen Rydell, and her father, mega-agent power broker Bryan Lourd. Not in attendance? Carrie’s sisters, Joely Fisher (yes, that one) and Tricia Leigh Fisher, and her brother, Todd Fisher. Joely and Tricia took to Instagram to confirm they would “strangely” not be at the ceremony celebrating Carrie:
Todd, meanwhile, went to TMZ with his feelings, because of course.
In response, Billie issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, saying in part:
“Days after my mom died, her brother and her sister chose to process their grief publicly and capitalize on my mother’s death, by doing multiple interviews and selling individual books for a lot of money[...] I found out they had done this through the press. […] Though I recognize they have every right to do whatever they choose, their actions were very hurtful to me at the most difficult time in my life. I chose to and still choose to deal with her loss in a much different way.”
So, it’s essentially a conflict over privacy, and Billie didn’t like her aunt and uncle profiting from her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths, and now the Walk of Fame ceremony exacerbated the situation by revealing their estrangement to the public. Billie’s response is basically holding to boundaries she set years ago. Anyone with a toxic family probably recognizes these patterns of behavior, including putting Billie on blast for, you know, insisting on her boundaries. It’s unfortunate this all got aired out in public, but the Walk of Fame ceremony honoring Carrie went off without a hitch—Billie, fittingly, wore a Princess Leia dress, and Mark Hamill showed up in support. It seemed like a nice moment, Fisher family drama aside.
You can watch the ceremony here:
