Carrie Fisher Bonded With Cary Grant Over a Shared Hatred of Chevy Chase
It’s the late great Carrie Fisher’s birthday, as the Star Wars icon and prolific writer would have turned 68 today. Fisher is obviously best known for playing Princess Leia, but her long list of acting credits also includes the “Mystery Woman” from The Blues Brothers, Marie from When Harry Met Sally and “Bianca Burnette,” the washed-up actress who accuses George Lucas of sexual misconduct in Scream 3.
Less high up on Fisher’s list of accomplishments is the 1981 comedy Under the Rainbow, a notorious turd about the making of The Wizard of Oz, also starring Chevy Chase. Inspired by possibly apocryphal stories involving the hotel hosting the “drunken” Munchkin actors, Under the Rainbow also threw in a wacky espionage plot line about Nazi spies, which is why Hitler gets heil-ed in the balls just five minutes into the movie.
It seems that the only positive aspect of starring in Under the Rainbow for Fisher was that it allowed her to befriend a Hollywood icon. As Fisher discussed during an interview with NPR in 2008, shortly after making the film, her mother, Debbie Reynolds, found out that she had been taking LSD. Out of concern, she put Fisher in touch with this guy:
Screen legend Cary Grant famously experimented with acid back in the ‘50s. “LSD permits you to fly apart,” Grant claimed. “I got clearer and clearer. Your subconscious takes over when you take it, and you become free of the usual discipline you impose upon yourself.”
So Fisher was forced to chat about drugs with the star of North by Northwest thanks to her mom. But as Fisher revealed in her book Wishful Drinking, she had no recollection of what was said during that talk, other than how she initially bonded with Grant, not over LSD, or even their shared first name, but due to the fact that they both passionately disliked Chevy Chase.
During the filming of Under the Rainbow, which Fisher called “one of the worst films ever made,” she got along with Chase “somewhat less than a house on fire.” At the same time, Grant was in the process of suing Chase for defamation after Chase called him a “homo” and “a gal” during an interview on The Tomorrow Show. Chase eventually settled the $10 million suit out of court, allegedly paying Grant $1 million. Incidentally, Chase later expressed regret for the homophobic comments — a mere 36 years after Cary Grant had died.
“So, Cary Grant was suing him and I wasn’t getting along that well with Chevy either,” Fisher recalled, “so we initially started the conversation by saying how, you know, what we had in common, other than the acid, was that neither of us got along with Chevy.”
Had Fisher not tragically passed away in 2015, she likely would have also gotten along splendidly with the cast of Community as well.
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