Carrie Fisher died in December 2016 after collapsing shortly before her flight landed in Los Angeles. The Star Wars icon suffered a cardiac arrest and, after spending four days in intensive care, died at the age of 60 in hospital.
A coroner's report later found that Fisher had cocaine in her system, as well as traces of heroin, other opiates, and MDMA. However, it was unable to determine whether those contributed to her death.
The actress long struggled with substance abuse issues and Fisher's close friend and singer James Blunt has now claimed Disney and Lucasfilm had put "pressure on her to be thin."
He and Fisher struck up an unlikely friendship in the early 2000s and wrote his first album, 2004's "Back to Bedlam," while staying in her house. Following her death, he performed a tribute to her which we've embedded below in case you're curious.
"I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house," he told audience members at the UK's Hay Festival. "And she’d been really mistreating her body, and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in a new Star Wars movie."
"So she was really on a high and a positive, but they had applied a lot of pressure on her to be thin. She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not in film and TV."
"And she really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and by the time she got on the plane, she had effectively killed herself," Blunt continued. "They say it was heart failure of some kind, but she had taken enough drugs to have a really good party."
The insinuation here appears to be that pressure from studio bosses to lose weight contributed to Fisher's drug use and death.
The actress had finished shooting her role as Princess Leia in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi when she died and had previously appeared in The Force Awakens. When J.J. Abrams returned to the franchise for The Rise of Skywalker, footage from deleted scenes was used to give Leia a send-off.
In his autobiography, Blunt said Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd, holds him partly responsible for her mother's passing.
"Charlie, her best friend, confronted her more directly and told her she needed to quit drugs," he wrote. "I took a different approach and did them with her, pretending to myself that I would guide her to redemption one day - just not today. As a result, her daughter Billie blames me in part for her death, and no longer speaks to me."