James Blunt says late friend Carrie Fisher’s ‘pressure’ to be thin for Star Wars sparked fatal drug relapse-Asyia Iftikhar-Entertainment – Metro

Carrie Fisher ‘mistreated her body’ after landing Star Wars reprisal, James Blunt said (Picture: AP)

Singer James Blunt got candid about how the late Carrie Fisher ‘killed herself’ trying to appear thin after reprising her beloved role in Star Wars.

Fisher, famed for her role as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, died aged 60 in December 2016 from a sudden cardiac arrest.

Just a year earlier she had stepped back into her role in the sci-fi franchise as the Princess after 32 years, starring in 2015’s Force Awakens and making a posthumous appearance in 2017’s The Last Jedi.

The actor was also a close friend of the You’re Beautiful hitmaker, 50, who dedicated his debut 2020 book, How To Be A Complete and Utter Blunt, to Fisher in a touching tribute.

Now, he has opened up about Fisher’s final days and the pressure she felt as a woman in Hollywood to look a certain way.

‘I just knew that the day before she died when she came back to my house and she’d been really mistreating her body and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in the new Star Wars movies,’ Blunt said while attending the Hay Literature Festival.

The pair had been close friends for over a decade (Picture: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock)

The Star Wars icon finished her previous stint in the role in 1983 (Picture: AP)

Blunt explained that despite her ‘high and positive’ attitude ‘they [the industry] had applied a lot of pressure on her to be thin, which is what they do.’

He continued: ‘So she spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry that men are allowed to grow old and women are not.’

The star suffered from a medical emergency on board a flight from London to Los Angeles in December from which she never recovered. An autopsy revealed she had been exposed to cocaine, heroine, methadone, MDMA and opiates in recent days.

‘She had to really put a lot of pressure on herself and started abusing drugs again,’ Blunt said.

‘So by the time she got on the plane, she had practically killed herself. They said it was a heart failure but she had taken enough drugs to have a great party.’

Fisher seen just months before her death in December 2016 (Picture: Getty)

The pair grew close after a chance meeting in Notting Hill in 2003 and Fisher invited him to stay in her LA home in 2004 while he recorded his debut album Back to Bedlam.

The chart-topping artist previously told the Guardian that it took a month for him to properly connect with Fisher when they finally spent the whole night talking.

‘After that, whenever I got back from the studio I’d go into her room to talk, no matter if it was 11pm or 3am. She became my best, best friend,’ Blunt added. Fisher eventually became the godmother to his eldest son.

Blunt said Hollywood pressure pushed Fisher towards ‘abusing drugs’ (Picture: Getty)

The Star Wars legend was open about her history with substance abuse, for which she attended rehab, and mental health issues such as bipolar disorder that she faced during her lifetime.

Just a month before her untimely death she penned a powerful column helping a reader who also had bipolar.

‘We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges,’ she wrote at the time.

‘Think of it as an opportunity to be heroic – not “I survived living in Mosul during an attack” heroic, but an emotional survival.’

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