Carrie Fisher

Born: 21st October 1956
Where: Beverly Hills, California

At the tender age of two, Fisher's father, the singer Eddie Fisher, divorced her mum, Debbie Reynolds, in order to marry Elizabeth Taylor, who promptly divorced him. By the time junior high school came around, Carrie had started appearing in her mother's Vegas nightclub act.

A few years later, she dropped out of school and, at seventeen, worked with her mum again, in the Broadway revival of Irene. Her first part in a movie came in the 1975 film Shampoo, two years later, she appeared in her most widely recognised role, Princess Leia in Star Wars.

Beating her drug and alcohol dependency, she married and then divorced Paul Simon in the early eighties. She wrote a book about the experience (Surrender the Pink), as she did about her drug meltdown in the late seventies (Postcards From the Edge), which was later made into a movie that earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination.

She had a daughter, Billie, with Bryan Lourd, but was devastated when he left her for a man.

Currently writing her fourth novel, Fisher is now one of the highest-paid script doctors in Hollywood, lending her talent to films such as Hook, Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, and The Wedding Singer.