By Rollo Ross
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – May the 4th, the annual unofficial “Star Wars” day, was bittersweet for fans in Hollywood as Princess Leia actress Carrie Fisher, who died at age 60 in 2016, received a posthumous star on the Walk of Fame on Thursday.
Along with a large group of fans, “Star Wars” droids R2-D2 and C-3PO and a pair of Stormtroopers came to the ceremony, as did actor Mark Hamill, director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy.
“It’s sad that she’s not with us today — that would have made it perfect — but she wouldn’t want us to be sad. She’d want us to have fun, she’d want us to laugh,” said Hamill, who played Leia’s brother, Luke Skywalker, in the franchise.
Fisher’s daughter, actor Billie Lourd, was on hand to represent her mother at the ceremony and receive the 2,754th star on Hollywood Boulevard. She joked that her mother would tell her nobody was really famous until they became a Pez candy dispenser.
“My mom is a double whammy, a Pez dispenser and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Momma, you’ve made it,” Lourd said.
Watching her mother in “Star Wars” as Princess Leia changed Lourd’s perception of her.
“I realized then that Leia is more than just a character. She’s a feeling, she is strength, she is grace, she is wit, she is femininity at its finest, she knows what she wants and she gets it,” Lourd said.
“She doesn’t need anyone to rescue her because she rescues herself and even rescues the rescuers, and no one could have played her like my mother.”
(Reporting by Rollo Ross; Editing by Mary Milliken and Leslie Adler)
