Mark Hamill has spent years telling the story of what Carrie Fisher meant to him, and his accounts have remained remarkably consistent: she was funnier than anyone he ever met, she made him feel like her best friend, and she was the one who reoriented his relationship with fame when he lost perspective. At a Star Wars Celebration tribute in April 2017, months after her death, he told thousands of fans that part of him did fall in love with her, and that every man she met came under her spell. Born September 25, 1951, in Oakland, California, Hamill was the fourth of seven children of a Navy captain, which meant the family moved constantly, eventually settling for a time in Japan, where Hamill graduated from a military base high school in Yokosuka in 1969. His father wanted him to join the Navy, but Hamill wanted to act, a tension that took years to resolve.
He enrolled in drama at Los Angeles City College, worked jobs including as a janitor, and built an early career through small television roles before landing a part in the pilot of Eight Is Enough. That pilot role seemed like a breakthrough, but then his agent set up an audition for a low-budget science fiction film with the working title The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. Directed by George Lucas, the project was so unusual that Hamill, during his screen test, thought he was playing a sidekick to Harrison Ford’s character and was not sure whether the film was supposed to be a comedy. He dropped out of Eight Is Enough, took the role of Luke Skywalker, and flew to England to begin production on a film nobody expected to change the world.
On December 30, 1975, at an audition in Los Angeles where Brian De Palma was simultaneously casting his horror film Carrie in the same building, Hamill first sat across from a 19-year-old Carrie Fisher for a chemistry read. He has described that first meeting with precision, recalling that he arranged dinner with her beforehand and was completely unprepared for the person he met. She was disarmingly candid about her family, her father’s addictions, her parents’ divorce, and the loneliness of growing up in a family where private pain was always threatening to become public property. Fisher was the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds, and her father had left her mother for Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was two, turning her family into one of Hollywood’s earliest tabloid scandals.
By 19, she had already developed the sharp, sardonic, deeply self-aware humor she would carry for the rest of her life. During filming in England in 1976, Hamill and Fisher and Harrison Ford found each other, and although the three were not particularly close during production, the bond developed afterward, once the film was released and they discovered simultaneously what they had become. At the Star Wars Celebration tribute, Hamill acknowledged that during filming, things briefly got complicated. On the pretext of talking about kissing techniques, the two of them ended up making out like, in his words, a couple of horny teenagers.
He said that what really cooled the passion was that at some point, they both started laughing. As he put it, laughing in your face kills your passion, and they dodged a bullet, having the fun without any of the responsibility. That shared, unstoppable laugh at the worst possible moment defined them for the next 40 years. Star Wars was released in May 1977 and changed everything immediately.
Hamill was 25 and one of the most famous people on Earth before he had quite processed what had happened. He has spoken about the disorientation of sudden fame, while Fisher navigated it differently, embracing the conventions, the fans, and the intimate relationship the character of Leia had created with millions of people. As Hamill told Variety, she was true Hollywood royalty and knew it. He spent the 1980s trying to establish a career beyond Luke Skywalker, taking theater roles on Broadway, playing Mozart in Amadeus and the lead in The Elephant Man.
When he auditioned for the film adaptation of Amadeus, director Miloš Forman was blunt, saying, “Oh, no, no, no. The Luke Skywalker is not to be being the Mozart. ” When Fisher attended one of his Broadway shows and noticed his playbill biography concluded with the phrase “He is also known for a series of popular space movies,” she asked him why he had not mentioned Star Wars. When he explained he wanted to be taken seriously as a theater actor, she looked at him and said, “Hey, get over yourself.
” He has credited that conversation many times over the years as the one that reoriented him. She had also survived things during those years he could only partially understand. Her battles with addiction, prescription drugs, alcohol, and the self-medication common in the industry were documented eventually in the memoirs she wrote with frankness that startled even those who thought they knew her. She was briefly engaged to Dan Aykroyd, married Paul Simon in 1983 and divorced him in 1984, then dated him again afterward.
She was in and out of psychiatric care grappling with bipolar disorder in an era when public conversation around mental health was far less evolved. She wrote about all of it in Postcards from the Edge, Wishful Drinking, and Shockaholic, not to expose herself, but because she believed honesty about these things was a form of service. Hamill watched this from the vantage point of the person who knew her longest in the industry, and he has described her advocacy for mental health awareness with reverence, ranking it alongside her performances and memoirs. At the tribute, he said that when you were in her presence, she made you feel like you were her best friend, and that every guy she met, including Dan Aykroyd and Paul Simon, came under her spell.
There were years of distance between them during the long gap after the original trilogy was finished. Hamill moved to theater and voice acting, while his 1978 marriage to Mary Lou York, a dental hygienist, kept him grounded, producing three children. When Disney announced in 2012 that a new trilogy was coming and the original cast would return, Hamill was not sure he wanted to go back. What made him say yes was partly Carrie, her enthusiasm for The Force Awakens unguarded and infectious, reminding him of what the whole thing had meant.
When they were on set together again after 30 years, it felt, he has said, like no time had passed. On December 23, 2016, Carrie Fisher suffered a cardiac arrest aboard a flight from London to Los Angeles. Hamill was in the middle of filming The Last Jedi. He posted on Twitter immediately, sending all his love to her.
He held on to hope for four days, posting updates and invoking the Force, before she died on December 27, 2016, at age 60. His wife came into the bedroom with tears rolling down her face, a moment he has started to tell more than once in public and been unable to finish. He told the Celebration audience months later that he had been going back and forth between grief and fury, saying, “I bounce back to anger because I’m mad. She should be here.
”
In 2024, at a fan convention in Chicago, he became emotional describing the moment his wife delivered the news, trailing off mid-sentence. He told the crowd, “It forever altered how I reacted to Star Wars in general. The heart was gone. I don’t talk about it because I don’t like reliving it.
” The Last Jedi, dedicated to her memory, required him to process his own grief publicly while completing a film that contained her final performance. He has said that watching her in the finished film is still an ambush every time. Fisher had once told him what she wanted at her funeral, saying, “If you go first, I’ll heckle your funeral,” and asking him to do the same for her. He did not heckle.
Standing on a stage in Orlando in April 2017, he told stories, read from a statement, and choked up in front of thousands of people who loved her. At the end of the tribute, he shared the image he holds of her: “She’s looking down from the celestial stratosphere with those big brown eyes, that sly smile on her face as she lovingly extends me the middle finger. And that’s how I want you to think of her. That was Carrie.
”
When she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in May 2023, Hamill was there, reading from the statement he had written in 2016 that she was their princess, dammit, and adding that everything would have been so much drabber and less interesting without her. He closed with the words, “I’ll never stop missing her, but I’m so thankful we had her as long as we did. I’m grateful for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness, and even the bratty, self-indulgent crap my beloved space twin drove me crazy with through the years. So, thank you, Carrie.
I love you. ”
