Harrison Ford has reacted to Carrie Fisher’s decision – shortly before her death last year – to reveal they’d once had an affair.
‘It was strange. For me,’ said Harrison, 75, to GQ, though he confessed he hasn’t read The Princess Diarist, the 2016 memoir in which Carrie aired out their fling.
They’d had a three-month dalliance during the 1976 London shoot of the first Star Wars film, back when Harrison was 33 years old and Carrie was only 19.
‘It was strange’: Harrison Ford has reacted in GQ to Carrie Fisher’s decision – shortly before her death last year – to reveal they’d once had an affair
At the time of his liaisons with Carrie, Harrison was still with his first wife Mary Marquardt – a 15-year marriage that ended in divorce in 1979.
When GQ prodded Harrison further on his response to the revelations in the memoir, he demurred: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, with Carrie’s untimely passing, I don’t really feel that it’s a subject that I want to discuss.’
Nor would Harrison give an answer when asked ‘whether you’d prefer that it hadn’t been written?’
He did admit he’d had ‘a degree’ of notice that the affair would be disclosed in the book. As it happens, Carrie has herself publicly discussed the moment she had told him about it.
Pictured in 1977: They’d had a three-month dalliance during the 1976 London shoot of the first Star Wars film, back when Harrison was 33 years old and Carrie was only 19
Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air last year to promote the memoir, she’d told Terry Gross she wouldn’t have publicized this story without warning him because ‘I wouldn’t have ambushed him like that, but it’s still – no matter if I told him or not, it probably feels like an ambush. It feels like an ambush to me, and I’m the one that wrote it.’
Carrie told Terry: ‘I said: “I found the journals that I kept during the first movie and I’m probably going to publish them.” And he just sort of raised his finger and said, “Lawyer!”‘
To which Carrie insisted: ‘”No, I won’t write anything that you don’t want. I mean, I’ll show it to you before and you can take anything out that you want taken out. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” which I, of course, have. Unduly uncomfortable.’
After sending him a copy, ‘I never heard back, so I can’t imagine that he was comfortable with everything that was in it. But it’s not like it’s negative about him – it’s just a personal story that’s been a secret for a long time.’
Final product: They’re seen here in the 1977 film with their co-star Mark Hamill (left)
The Princess Diarist contained tracts of the journals Carrie had kept during the filming of the first Star Wars film, interspersed with new text written for the public.
It hit bookshelves November 22. On December 23, Carrie suffered cardiac arrest on a flight, and she was pronounced dead on December 27 at the age of 60.
A day later, her mother Debbie Reynolds had a stroke and died at 84 – after telling her son Todd Fisher: ‘I miss her so much, I want to be with Carrie,’ according to TMZ.
The last of Carrie’s three memoirs, The Princess Diarist paints her as painfully insecure and completely besotted with the much gruffer and more aloof Harrison.
Though ‘the brutal strength of Harrison’s preferred strain of pot’ had left her with a less-than-perfect memory of that time, she wrote a great deal of what she’d recalled.
Charisma: Harrison’s character Han Solo and Carrie’s character Princess Leia famously ignite their own romance in the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back
She described herself as having been a ‘bad kisser,’ and looking back at their their first roll in the sheets, she wrote: ‘Our affable ordeal behind us, Harrison fell asleep and I tried to. God, he really was handsome. I forgave him for not loving me in the way one usually expects – and almost forgave myself for not expecting it.’
On the next page, she remembered: ‘I didn’t know how I would live through the five whole days of filming following that first weekend. Those five days on set together went unbearably slowly, with our having to behave toward each other as if the weekend before hadn’t even occurred. Weekdays were off-limits, intimacy-wise.’
She wrote of a time she got a laugh out of him by impersonating him: ‘If I’d never succeeded in coaxing this coveted laughter of his out into the waiting world, I would never have known what I was missing – just that I was missing something, besides his not being single or accessible or, for the most part, warm.’
The daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher went on: ‘I wouldn’t have been able to imagine his laughing wholeheartedly, or known how amazing it felt to actually be with the person you were with and feel that he liked you!’
Later: Yet in the 2015 movie Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, it’s revealed Han and Leia have split, their son Kylo Ren corrupted under the apprenticeship of the villainous Snoke
In the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, Harrison’s character Han Solo and Carrie’s character Princess Leia famously ignite their own romance – one that lasts on through the 1983 end of the original trilogy, Return Of The Jedi.
Yet in the 2015 movie Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, it’s revealed that Han and Leia have split, and that they’ve had a son called Kylo Ren who’s fallen under the nefarious tutelage of the villainous Supreme Leader Snoke.
Carrie’s first memoir, 2008’s Wishful Drinking – an adaptation of her one-woman-show of the same name – was followed in 2010 by Shockaholic.
Literary swan song: The Princess Diarist hit bookshelves November 22; On December 23, Carrie suffered cardiac arrest on a flight, and she was pronounced dead December 27, aged 60
Before then, she’d contented herself with romans à clef, starting with the blistering 1987 comic novel Postcards From The Edge, which follows a Hollywood actress as she struggles to reassemble her life and career post-rehab.
It was adapted into a 1990 Mike Nichols movie starring Meryl Streep as the Carrie analog and Shirley MacLaine as a character widely perceived to be based on Debbie.
Carrie’s other novels were 1990’s Surrender The Pink, 1993’s Delusions Of Grandma, and the 2004 Postcards From The Edge sequel The Best Awful.
Pictured in 2015: A day later, her mother Debbie Reynolds had a stroke and died at 84 – after telling her son Todd Fisher: ‘I miss her so much, I want to be with Carrie,’ according to TMZ