Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher dies age 60

Carrie Fisher, the actor, writer and daughter of Hollywood royalty who became internationally famous as Princess Leia of Star Wars, has died, Variety has confirmed. She was 60.

Fisher died on Tuesday morning (US time) after suffering what was described as a massive heart attack on Friday while on a flight from London to Los Angeles.

She had been in London filming episodes of the Amazon/Channel 4 comedy Catastrophe. Fisher was rushed from Los Angeles International Airport to UCLA Medical Center after the plane landed.

Fisher was the daughter of actor Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, whose marriage famously broke up when Eddie Fisher had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor.

She often remarked that she was born in the spotlight, and her life and career reflected the highs and lows of the entertainment business. Her mother's career struggles after her 1950s heyday weighed heavily on Fisher.

"I grew up on the back side of show business. So I had no desire to go into it. It had beat up my mother," Fisher told the New York Times in 2006. "I had a front-and-centre view of how that hurt her. I understood that when they were done with you, they were done."

Fisher demonstrated her skill as a writer with the best-selling 1987 novel Postcards From the Edge, about an actor struggling to rebuild her career after an overdose. 

Fisher wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

Fisher also penned the autobiographical 2008 book Wishful Drinking, based on her one-woman stage show of the same name.

She had recently been promoting her newly published memoir of her Star Wars years, The Princess Diarist.

- NZ Herald