Fisher and Reynolds divorced in 1959 amid the actor’s highly publicized affair with Elizabeth Taylor
Credit: Eric Charbonneau/Shutterstock
NEED TO KNOW
- Billie Lourd recalls her grandmother Debbie Reynolds joking about her divorce from Eddie Fisher after his affair with Elizabeth Taylor
- Lourd reflected on her Hollywood lineage, calling herself “lucky” to be Carrie Fisher’s daughter and Debbie Reynolds’s granddaughter in a recently published interview with The Times
- Her grandparents split in 1959 following Fisher and Taylor’s affair
Billie Lourd is sharing her late grandmother Debbie Reynolds‘s thoughts on her ex-husband Eddie Fisher‘s highly publicized affair with Elizabeth Taylor.
In an interview with The Times published on Sept. 19, Lourd, 34, opened up about her star-studded lineage, including her mother Carrie Fisher, who died from a cardiac arrest on a flight at 60 on Dec. 27, 2016, and her grandmother Reynolds, who died from a stroke at age 84 just one day later on Dec. 28.
“And that was one of my grandma’s favorite bedtime stories,” Lourd told the outlet of Reynolds’s 1959 divorce from Fisher amid his affair with Taylor. “Like, ‘You know, dear, we used to have a house in Palm Springs. But then there was the divorce from Eddie…’ ”
At the height of the affair, Taylor was famously quoted as saying “What do you expect me to do, sleep alone?” Fisher and Taylor’s relationship began when she was newly widowed after her third husband, film producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash in 1958.
Fisher and Taylor tied the knot in 1959 and were married until 1964, with Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton contributing to the end of the marriage.
Todd Fisher, the son of Fisher and Reynolds and the brother of the late Carrie, shared a photo of his parents on New Year’s Day 2026, and reflected on the happier moments of their marriage. The actors married on Sept. 26, 1955.
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“My mother and father at a January 1, 1955 New Year’s Party. I tell you, I don’t know if I ever saw her this happy, if only for a moment,” Todd, 68, captioned the Instagram post. “She told me one day, we were discussing her wedding ring that Cat [Todd’s wife] now wears, ‘When your father put this ring on my finger, we were very much in love.’ ”
Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty
Lourd does not shun her long-standing old Hollywood legacy, telling The Times she feels “lucky” to have been raised in proximity to her mother and grandmother’s respective talents.
“They really were two of the most talented women of all time and I feel so lucky to live under their glittery umbrellas,” the Monster actress told the outlet. “For a while I tried to hide from it but now I say it loud and proud — I’m Carrie Fisher’s daughter and I’m Debbie Reynolds’s granddaughter, and I feel so lucky to be able to say that.”
On May 4, known as Star Wars Day due to the play on words (“May the 4th be with you” mirrors the iconic line “may the force be with you”), Lourd shared a glimpse of how she keeps her mother’s legacy alive.
In a photo on Instagram, her son Kingston, 5, and daughter Jackson, 3, appeared to be watching 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope on a television. Lourd snapped a photo during one of her mother’s first scenes in the movie as Princess Leia, whom Fisher played in the original Star Wars trilogy and the 2010s sequel trilogy.
Loud, whose father is talent agent Bryan Lourd, stars in FX’s American Horror Story: 13 and Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
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