Carrie Fisher called up her best friend and fellow actor, Griffin Dunne, in a panic over her hair style for the 1977 sci-fi film Star Wars, he has recalled, as she fretted that the project would be a “f***ing disaster”.
Dunne recounts his friendship with the late star in his new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, which is out on 11 June via Penguin Press, along with other memories from a childhood surrounded by famous faces.
In an extract published by The Times, Dunne recalls how he received a call from his longtime friend, whom he met through his younger brother when she came over to the family’s home for dinner.
“It was 1976 and one day Carrie said offhandedly that she had landed a job in some science-fiction movie shooting in England,” he wrote. “‘Is there a part in it for me?’ I asked, oblivious to what a normal person would say, like ‘Congrats’ or ‘That’s great!’
“The only one you would have been right for is being played by Mark somebody,” Fisher apparently responded, referring to her co-star Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker.
“It’s a really stupid script and you would have turned it down, I promise.”
Fisher, with whom Dunne shared a flat at the time, told him she was also acting opposite “some older guy named Harrison Ford”, whom he realised had worked as a carpenter for his aunt, the writer Joan Didion.
“Like an eager puppy I’d handed him nails or dug for hardware from his worn canvas toolkit,” he said. “In return he would slip me one of his Marlboros, the filters of which I clipped off because that’s what he did.
“Harrison cut me off from his endless relay of joints because his stuff was so strong that after one toke I couldn’t tell the difference between a saw and a tape measure. I simply idolised the dude and hated my envy that Carrie would get to spend so much time with him.”
Fisher, who revealed she had a three-month affair with Ford in her 2016 memoir, grew anxious as the release date for Star Wars loomed on 25 May 1997, and called Dunne from the shoot in England in a panic over her wardrobe.
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“‘You should see what they did to my hair!’ she had screamed into the phone on location, usually mornings before going to set for her, four in the morning for me. ‘I look like I’m wearing two bagels over my ears.’”
She added: “And I’m acting with an eight-foot yeti and a four-foot Brit in a rolling trash can! We shoot at s*** we can’t see on green screens with ray guns that don’t even have a trigger. This movie is going to be a f***ing disaster.”
Of course, Dunne went on to acknowledge, the film was far from a disaster, and his friendship with Fisher shifted as she shot to global fame as Princess Leia Organa, a leader of the Rebel Alliance.
Fisher died aged 60 in 2016, after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles.
