Steve Martin deleted a tweet intended to honor his longtime friend Carrie Fisher, who died Tuesday at 60, amidst a barrage of anger on social media and the internet.
On Tuesday, shortly after the actress died in a hospital after suffering a heart attack on a transatlantic flight Friday, Martin tweeted, “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.”
Here's Steve Martin's fine little tweet praising Carrie Fisher that some grumps pressured him to delete. pic.twitter.com/A1W5qYkdwI
Fisher had repeatedly spoken out against being a sex object and hated the gold slave bikini her character was forced to wear in “Return of the Jedi,” which made her the center of numerous ’80s teen boy fantasies.
In light of that, Martin’s tweet, which touched on Fisher’s appearance in a way many found inappropriate or even sexist, crediting her for being “witty and bright” as somewhat of an afterthought to her appearance sparked plenty of backlash.
New York Magazine even published an entire post critical of Martin’s tweet, originally headlined “Steve Martin, This Is a Bad Tribute to Carrie Fisher.”
Martin took down the tweet a few hours after posting, which sparked a new round of social media garment rending from people upset that he decided to respond to the criticism in that way.
Almost exactly one month before she passed away, the quotable and lovable Carrie Fisher appeared on NPR's "Fresh Air," where she dispensed pearls of wisdom -- as well as incisive barbs -- with host Terry Gross.
Here are a few of her best lines:
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"I don't think it's that revealing, or it's certainly not offensive. It's not unkind about him. It's flattering. I mean, the way people are reacting to it is funny to me, too. I'd do him at 73." -- Fisher talking about her affair with "Star Wars" co-star Harrison Ford in her autobiography "The Princess Diarist"
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"I don't know, maybe eight years ago some guy said to me, I thought about you every day from when I was 12 to when I was 22. And I said every day? And he said, well, four times a day." -- on realizing she was the object of many young men's fantasies
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"I actually don't think there is that much of a downside. The downside is the hair. The downside is the hair and some of the outfits. But I like Princess Leia. I like how she handles things. I like how she treats people. I -- she tells the truth. She, you know, gets what she wants done. I don't have a real problem with Princess Leia. I've sort of melded with her over time." -- on playing Princess Leia
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"A giant, fat face like a sanddab with features." -- on her self-image when she played Princess Leia
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"No, I didn't. I wanted a relationship with him, and that was the one that was available so I took it." -- on not resenting becoming a caretaker to her father, who left the family when she was 2 to be with Elizabeth Taylor
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"It was the dialogue: 'I thought I recognized your foul stench when I arrived on board.' Say that like I just said it. It sounds weird. So it was very arch dialogue, so that's my excuse. And I'm living with it right now." -- on why her "Star Wars" accent sounded vaguely British
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"There are very few women from her generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again. I mean, she's had an amazing life, and she's someone to admire." -- on her mother, Debbie Reynolds
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"Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it's sort of -- in a way, it's my way of trying to understand myself. I don't know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don't know - I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too." -- on oversharing
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"I've never seen my mother with bad manners until I saw her with the nurses. But they were telling her what to do, and no one tells my mother what to do. And so I had - I had to say at one point to my mother, when she was yelling at her nurse, Mom, not cool." -- on her mother's relationship with her nurses
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What she told Terry Gross about Harrison Ford, her mother, and the teenage boys who obsessed over Princess Leia
Almost exactly one month before she passed away, the quotable and lovable Carrie Fisher appeared on NPR's "Fresh Air," where she dispensed pearls of wisdom -- as well as incisive barbs -- with host Terry Gross.