History has taught us to approach a great actor’s final screen role with a sense of cautious curiosity, to not expect the last word to necessarily be the best. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams and Gene Kelly have all bowed out with films that it would be kindest to forget or at least not use them as any form of defining statement on careers that have usually and understandably peaked years prior. The death of Carrie Fisher in 2016 left behind an unfinished Star Wars trilogy and sadly denied her the integral role she was expected to play in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, her appearance in the film cobbled together from unreleased Force Awakens footage.
It remains a sad sting, given how rewarding it had been to see her even around the edges of the first two chapters but a thrill to have her back in front of the widest audience possible, a fittingly grand way to say goodbye to someone whose talents always felt larger than life. But what many of us didn’t know at the time and in the years since is that Fisher’s final role was actually of a far smaller scale in a film that has been stuck in limbo ever since, wrapped just four weeks before her death.
