New series of A Life in Ten Pictures begins with Carrie Fisher

And her celebrity status went stratospheric in 1977 when she was cast, aged just 19, in a movie that would change Hollywood, and her life, forever.

But while Fisher will always be known as the woman who played Princess Leia in Star Wars, she was much more than just an actress who happened to have her hair styled into a bagel-bun and wore a gold bikini.

Fisher is the subject in the first of a new run of A Life in Ten Pictures, the series which unlocks extraordinary lives through a unique lens – by using a collection of photographs, ranging from iconic shots to private snaps.

This new six-part series will focus on the lives of Bruce Lee, Robin Williams, Alexander McQueen, Nelson Mandela and Ella Fitzgerald.

However, it begins with Fisher, who passed away in December 2016, aged 60.

We follow her life from her childhood in California when she “hid in books”, to her appearance in the hit Broadway revival Irene in 1973, alongside her mother.

Fisher made her film debut in 1975 as Lorna Karpf in comedy Shampoo, before her big break in George Lucas’ aforementioned space saga.

During this programme, we see Fisher on the sets of, and appearing in, other movies too, including The Blues Brothers, Hannah and Her Sisters, The ‘Burbs, When Harry Met Sally…, Soapdish, and The Women.

In her later years, she also had a somewhat prolific career as a TV guest star.

However, for many, Fisher’s life will be most celebrated not for her acting, but for her comedic accounts of life in the celebrity fishbowl of Hollywood, as well as her personal struggles.

Her screenplay Postcards from the Edge, which dealt with issues of mental health and addiction, was adapted into a 1990 film, while more books followed, including Delusions of Grandma, Surrender the Pink, The Best Awful, Shockaholic and her autobiography The Princess Diarist.

Fisher’s romantic life was also characterised by drama.

Her marriage to musician Paul Simon in the early 1980s ended after 11 months, and she later married Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd, with whom she had a daughter, Billie.

But that union ended with Lourd leaving her for a man. “I turn people gay,” she said in 2012. “It is an unusual superpower,”.

Fisher had bipolar disorder for which she received electroshock therapy.

She also chain-smoked, confessed to a love of LSD and had to addictions to cocaine and painkillers.

Nevertheless, she was never shy of admitting her problems and raising awareness, and, as a result, the women who played Princess Leia is still considered somewhat of a queen by people with mental illness.

A Life in Ten Pictures is based around the question: “If every picture tells a story of a person, a place, a time, can the right shots unlock the secrets of a whole life?”

Although Fisher refused to be defined by the iconic images of her in a galaxy far, far away, there are still a few Star Wars shots in this rundown which chronicles the life of an extraordinary woman who was a ‘force’ for good, on and off the screen.