Actress and author Carrie Fisher has confirmed what she has hinted at over the years — that she and her “Star Wars” co-star Harrison Ford had an affair during of the making of the 1977 film that launched the franchise.
“It was so intense,” Fisher — whose upcoming memoir “The Princess Diarist” recounts her time playing Princess Leia in the science-fiction classic — told People magazine in online excerpts Tuesday from the issue being published Friday. “It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend.”
Fisher, 60, recalls in the new book that her affair with married father-of-two Ford began the night of a birthday party for filmmaker George Lucas, who turned 32 in May 1976, while “Star Wars” was in production. “I looked over at Harrison. A hero’s face — a few strands of hair fell over his noble, slightly furrowed brow,” she writes of their first time together. “How could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me?”
E! News said Tuesday that according to the book, Ford, then 33, got Fisher, then 19, inebriated and seduced her while they were filming in Tunisia. But “Star Wars” shot in that North African nation from March 22 to April 4, 1976, well before Lucas’ birthday. Fisher concedes in the book that some details from four decades ago were hazy due to “the brutal strength of Harrison’s preferred strain of pot.”
E! added that Fisher says the affair was not responsible for Ford’s breakup with first wife Mary Marquardt, whom the actor divorced in 1979. The marriage ended, she writes, “for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with me.”
According to People, Fisher says in her book that the affair ended when filming did. The production, which moved to Elstree Studios in England on April 7, 1976, wrapped principal photography July 16, though Ford’s last day on set was June 24.
“I was so inexperienced, but I trusted something about him,” Fisher told People. “He was kind.”
