When Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher partied with The Rolling Stones
After losing out on a role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver to Jodie Foster in the mid-1970s, Carrie Fisher caught her train to stardom in George Lucas’ sci-fi franchise, Star Wars. The promising concept was introduced in 1977 with the franchise’s first instalment, A New Hope, which launched Fisher to stardom alongside Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford.
When production on A New Hope began, Fisher, who portrayed Princess Leia, was just 19 and Ford, portraying Han Solo, was 33. Despite this age difference and the fact that Ford was married with two children, the pair entered a romantic affair while working on Star Wars together.
In her memoir, The Princess Diarist, Fisher remembered a particularly pivotal night when she joined fellow cast members at George Lucas’ birthday party. “I looked over at Harrison. A hero’s face — a few strands of hair fell over his noble, slightly furrowed brow,” she wrote. “How could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery, and here I was both counting and spending the money.”
“I was shocked by the fact that he fancied me. I was a very insecure girl and had only had one boyfriend,” she continued. Adding later, “I was so inexperienced, but I trusted something about him. He was kind.”
Speaking to The Today Show many years later, the actor described the affair as a “three-month one-night stand”.
Although the relationship fizzled out, Ford and Fisher maintained friendly contact while working on Star Wars together. As an “inexperienced” youngster, Fisher found herself brushing shoulders with the entertaining elite, partying like a seasoned adult.
In one of her most memorable extracurricular experiences with Ford, Fisher found herself partying with The Rolling Stones. At the time, Lucas was shooting his second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. The pair of actors were due on set the following day but sacrificed much-needed sleep for a drug-fuelled party.
Discussing the wild party with Conan O’Brien in 2016, just months before her death, Fisher recalled that she and Ford were taken by surprise with a “Tunisian Death Drink”. “Yes, that one’s true … I was renting Eric Idle’s house for five months, and he was doing Monty Python down in Tunisia, and they had a drink that they would give to the extras to make them more compliant. And they called it the Tunisian Death Drink.”
“We had an early call, and Eric called down and said, ‘The Rolling Stones are here!’ and I came down, and it was all of them,” she continued. “I called Harrison and said, ‘Get over here! This is ridiculous!’ I wonder how he remembers it. I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren’t hungover—we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day. We don’t really smile a lot in the movie, but there we [are] smiling.”
In the clip below, Carrie Fisher claims she could see the effects of the all-nighter in a still from one of the scenes.
