Carrie Fisher, actress best known as Princess Leia in the "Star Wars" movie franchise, died at the age of 60 on Tuesday morning, after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles last Friday.
The family spokesman Simon Hall confirmed the death in a statement. Fisher was in London for filming episodes of the comedy "Catastrophe". Suffering heart attack on the flight back home, Fisher was rushed from Los Angeles International Airport to UCLA Medical Center after the plane landed around noon.
Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd said in memory of her mother, "She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly" .
As daughter of renowned Hollywood entertainers Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, she was brought up in the world of film, theater and television.
She was turned into an international movie star when the "Star Wars" released in 1977. The film, written and directed by George Lucas, became world famous and broke box-office records around the globe.
Fisher demonstrated her skill as a writer with the best-selling 1987 novel "Postcards from the Edge", about an actress struggling to rebuild her career after an overdose. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film adaptation.
Fisher also penned the autobiographical book "Wishful Drinking" in 2008, based on her one-woman stage show of the same name. And recently she had been promoting her newly published memoir of her Star Wars years, "The Princess Diarist".