Carrie Fisher at Home: 10 Photos of the Star Wars Legend’s Life Behind the Scenes

Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, were practically inseparable in their final years. Fisher lived in a charming Spanish-style estate high up in the Hollywood Hills, and her mom, at Fisher’s behest, moved into the neighboring cottage. Their living situation was “very nice,” Reynolds once said, noting how it afforded her time with granddaughter Billie Lourd as well as her son, Todd, who lived close by.

“I’m my mom’s best friend,” the Star Wars icon said in the 2016 documentary Bright Lights, which explored the relationship between Fisher and Reynolds. “Far more than I ever would want to, I know what my mother feels and wants.” Tragedy struck that year, when Fisher went into cardiac arrest at age 60 during a flight and died days later. Reynolds died the next day following a stroke at age 84. “[Reynolds] didn’t want to leave Carrie and did not want her to be alone,” Todd told 20/20.

But Fisher—who would have turned 70 today—was rarely by herself, it seems, telling AD in 2004, “There’s been anything and everything holed up in this Hollywood-style hacienda.” Read on for a look inside the star’s life at home through the decades.

The Fisher family

Carrie was about 18 months old and living in the Los Angeles area at the time of this 1958 family photo, in which her brother Todd was still an infant. The siblings were the children of Singin’ in the Rain star Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, who was also a singer and actor. Prior to Todd’s birth on February 24 of that year, the trio moved to a home on Conway Avenue in Holmby Hills. “We needed a bigger house and found a white-brick, two-story, four-bedroom place,” Reynolds wrote in Debbie: My Life. “It was a spacious house with a large family room and a big bay window that overlooked a pool and a rose garden.”

New beginnings

Fisher’s parents divorced in 1959; her father left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor following the death of Taylor’s husband, Mike Todd. Carrie and her brother—pictured here in the early 1960s—moved with their mother to a house in Beverly Hills owned by Reynolds’ second husband, successful businessman Harry Karl. According to Carrie, Karl’s residence felt “more like a place where you would get your passport stamped” than a home. There were three swimming pools and a five-car garage that housed at least two Rolls-Royces. Carrie and Todd each had their own bedroom with a marble en suite bathroom, and the home had a projection room the size of a small theater.

At-home wedding

Carrie was 26 when she married musician Paul Simon in New York City. The Washington Post reported that the private ceremony, held at Simon’s Central Park West apartment, was attended by Carrie’s parents as well as celebrities including Billy Joel, George Lucas, Mike Nichols, Randy Newman, Robin Williams, Christie Brinkley, and Art Garfunkel, Simon’s music partner. Carrie and Paul’s marriage was brief—less than a year—but her connection to their Muller Frères lamp would last decades. When AD visited the actor’s final home in Hollywood Hills, it sat on her living room Steinway. “That lamp always represented being married to Paul,” she said of the furniture piece, which she had paid $25,000 for during a “manic” shopping spree. “Whenever we were separating—and meant it—I’d take that. No luggage, just the lamp.”

A house with history

About a year after Carrie returned to the role of Princess Leia for 1983’s Return of the Jedi (and donned the character’s iconic metal bikini on the cover of the 1983 summer issue of Rolling Stone), she purchased a 2,600-square-foot Los Angeles home from Starsky & Hutch star David Soul for $925,000. The three-bedroom house was set on approximately one acre and included a sauna, a pool, and a forest of bamboo. The property later passed through several notable hands, including Creative Artists Agency (CAA) co-chairman Kevin Huvane and filmmaker Roberto Sneider, before Channing Tatum picked it up for $6 million in 2015, according to Variety.

Finding her light

Carrie, pictured at her Los Angeles home in 1987, ventured into writing with her semi-autobiographical debut novel, Postcards from the Edge, which hit shelves that year and became a bestseller. Though she told the Los Angeles Times that LA never made her “crazy,” the actor still felt like she didn’t belong there at times. “I don’t dress right,” she said. “I don’t look right. I don’t embrace the values of the community. And yet it always seems to me that the other people function better.” In her book, she explained, “You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood because everybody does the fake closeness so well.”

A happy hideaway

Carrie made her home her own. Writer Lisa Liebmann described her estate as having a “whimsically Western motif” both “inside and out” in a September 1990 Interview magazine feature. The driveway gate featured a painted rodeo scene and a plaque that read, “Wow! That Was Some Cup of Coffee Institute of Alternative Life-Styles.” Outside was a swimming pool with rocks lining the perimeter, as well as a tree house with a sign that read “Beware of Trains.” Carrie also had a fake cow out back. According to a 1990 Time feature, when Jack Nicholson paid her a visit, he asked, “Just exactly how old are the children?” At the time, it would’ve been about two years until Fisher’s only child, daughter Billie Lourd, was born.

Animal house

During the actor’s years her Beverly Hills homes, she lived with multiple pets, including a Jack Russell terrier named Buddy and a couple of talking parrots named Dean and Joan. “I like birds and dogs. I’m allergic to cats,” Fisher told Interview. “The parrots are great. They do something I refer to as ‘the Phone Call from Venus.’ They repeat all my phone conversations. It can [be] very annoying—like having a lot of children in the house screaming.” But it wasn’t all bad. “Joan likes to come visit me while I’m in the tub,” she said. “She sings opera, too.”

Eternal bond

In this 1990 photograph, Reynolds can be seen spending time with in Los Angeles—though it would be a few years until they were next-door neighbors. After the two died in 2016, their homes hit the market as one estate spanning 3.5 acres for $18 million, Mansion Global reported in June 2017. Two months later, Lourd told Sarah Paulson in a sit-down with Town & Country that she had decided to keep her mother’s house. “I went back and forth on it, but it’s so magical,” said Lourd. “It’s such a special place. And I’m having a couple of friends move in with me, like an old-style commune.”

Fabulous furnishings

When the ’Burbs star moved into her final home in 1993, it was actually her “furniture that made the call,” she told AD in 2004. “I had so much stuff, I had to live in a place where it wanted to go.” Carrie (or, rather, the furniture) chose a home that originally belonged to King Kong actor Robert Armstrong. After that, Bette Davis lived there, before it was bought by Edith Head. When Fisher took over in the ’90s, she decked the home out with oversized 1930s leather club chairs, folk art, and Indian rugs. “My daughter likes modern, so we’ve ended up with bubble and egg chairs as well as the pillowy fake-suede sofa by Michel Ducaroy in the den, where we usually end up, since the plasma TV comes out of the wooden window seat,” she said. “I’m not sure how successful the modern is—I don’t like it, but at least it’s playful like the rest of the place.”

A welcoming host

The actor opened her home to a number of friends over the years. She told AD that her guesthouse had seen its fair share of “the famous and near famous: the well and those in need of healing, addicts, depressives, those being treated for cancer and HIV, those just passing through.” At one point, an upright piano was stored in the bathroom because “we had no place else to put it, and the room has good acoustics,” Carrie said—so singer James Blunt used the space as a studio and recorded a song. “This is just one of those houses that does things to people,” the actor said.