3rd UPDATE with statement on condition, 4:14 PM: Star Wars original Carrie Fisher suffered a heart attack on a plane en route to Los Angeles from London today. A source tells Deadline she was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and is on assisted breathing. Her brother, Todd Fisher, told the Associated Press this afternoon that she is in stable condition and “out of emergency.”
Police at LAX confirmed that a female passenger in her early 60s — later confirmed to be Fisher — was taken off United Airlines Flight 935 from the UK today after suffering “what seems to be a heart attack.”
With most of the town now off for the holidays, reps for Fisher have not responded to Deadline’s request for comment.
The flight crew and some passengers worked on her before the plane landed, and the LAFD said they responded to a call at 12:11 PM that a patient was in cardiac arrest on an inbound flight. Paramedics who were standing by for the plane’s arrival at Gate 74 provided life support and aggressively treated and transported her to the hospital.
A woman who said she was aboard the United Airlines jet tweeted this:
That woman’s companion on the flight tweeted this:
Fisher, 60, shot to stardom in 1977 as Princess Leia in the first Star Wars film. She has been in the UK on a book tour for The Princess Diarist, a memoir about the behind-the-scenes goings-on on the set of Star Wars and its first sequels. She reprised the role in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return of the Jedi before appearing in last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. She also is set to appear in Star Wars: Episode VIII, which Disney will release in December 2017.
The daughter of Hollywood legends Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, she recurs on Amazon’s Catastrophe, which films in the UK, and Fox toon Family Guy and has appeared in such films as Shampoo and When Harry Met Sally. She also has played herself on TV shows including The Big Bang Theory and Sex and the City and in the 2014 feature Maps to the Stars.
Fisher also has authored two other memoirs and — Shockaholic and Wishful Drinking — and four novels.
Deadline is reaching out to authorities for details about the incident. Meanwhile, her Star Wars colleagues Mark Hamill and Peter Mayhew — the actor who played Chewbacca in multiple films — tweeted their thoughts:
Anita Busch contributed to this report.
