James Blunt has claimed that Carrie Fisher was “mistreating her body” before her death in 2016, due to Star Wars bosses putting “pressure on her to be thin”. The “You’re Beautiful” singer , 50, was discussing his memoir Loosely Based on a Made-Up Story at Hay Festival , when he reminisced about his late friend Fisher, who died suddenly aged 60 in 2016. Blunt and Fisher met through mutual friends in the Noughties and struck up an unlikely bond.
He ended up moving into her Los Angeles home – where she and her mother, the actor and singer Debbie Reynolds, also lived – and he recorded his first album, 2004’s Back to Bedlam , while staying there. Blunt has previously revealed he was with the Princess Leia actor the night before she was found unresponsive on a flight from London to Los Angeles. She died days later, and a toxicology report found she had cocaine, heroin, MDMA and methadone in her system.
“I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house,” he told audiences at Hay. “And she’d been really mistreating her body, and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in a new Star Wars movie. “So she was really on a high and a positive, but they had applied a lot of pressure on her to be thin.
She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not in film and TV." He added: “And she really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs ag.
