Chris Pizzello/AP/REX/Shutterstock Carrie Fisher didn't fear death.
The actress, best known for playing Leia in the Star Wars films, died at age 60 in a hospital Tuesday, days after suffering a cardiac event on a plane.
"No," Fisher told the Rolling Stone in an interview posted a month ago, when asked if she feared death. "I fear dying. Anything with pain associated with it, I don't like. I've been there for a couple of people when they were dying; it didn't look like fun. But if I was gonna do it, I'd want someone like me around. And I will be there!"
Fisher had joked about her future obituary in her 2008 memoir Wishful Drinking and the quote was widely circulated on social media after her death.
The actress said Star Wars creator George Lucas told her she could not wear a bra as Leia because "there's no underwear in space" and that when one became weightless there, their bra would not expand with their body, so the garment would strangle them.
"Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra," Fisher wrote.
Fisher was known for her dry sense of humor and her candor, which she often showcased in interviews and in her books.
"I saw where someone was complaining about how much celebrities charge for autographs...and in our defense someone said, 'Well you know, it may cost that much now, but when she dies, it's really going to be worth a lot,'" Fisher wrote in her recent new memoir The Princess Diarist. "So my death is worth something to these people. If I had enough pictures signed, someone could put out a hit on me."
"Of course I also still sign autographs for free," she added.
Fisher had dedicated the book to a number of people, including her 84-year-old mother, actress Debbie Reynolds, who had a health scare in 2012 when she was hospitalized after suffering an adverse reaction to prescription medication.
"For my mother—for being too stubborn and thoughtful to die," Fisher wrote. "I love you, but that whole emergency, almost dying thing, wasn't funny. Don't even THINK about doing it again in any form."
In her books and interviews, Fisher often opened up about her past substance abuse and rehab.
"It struck me today that the people that have had an impact on me are the people who didn't make it. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Lenny Bruce, Janis Jolin, John Belushi," Fisher wrote in her 1987 book Postcards From the Edge. "In our culture there people are heroes."
"Most of the people I've admired in show business—comedians, writers, actors—are alcoholics or drug addicts or suicides," she said. "It's bizarre. And I get to be in that club now. It's the one thing I cling to in here: Wow, I'm hip now, like the dead people. Romancing the stoned."
Fisher also wrote and talked about her diet struggles.
"My question is, if you die when you're fat, are you a fat ghost, or do they go back to a more flattering time?" she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in May, while exercising on a treadmill.
In 2009, Carrie told NBC Bay Area in 2009, when asked there were topics that are particularly unfunny to her, "I think probably death is really not funny. Not having experienced it, however, I can only [imagine]."
Fisher had, however, lost loved ones. Her experience dealing with their deaths taught her not to fear it for herself.
"I don't think it's scary," she told A&U magazine in 1998. "You're still living up until you die."