Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd explains her relationship with Debbie Reynolds
The actress said her family tried to talk her out of pursuing an acting career
The actress said her family tried to talk her out of pursuing an acting career
In just two days, Scream Queens actress Billie Lourd lost both her mother, Carrie Fisher, and her grandmother, Debbie Reynolds.
"Carrie's daughter is 24 years old. To have to lose the girls, it's just horrible," her uncle, Todd Fisher, told . "She's got their genes, but you can't even imagine. I can't imagine being 24 and having to do this — and I'm 59."
Earlier this month, Lourd talked about her close relationship with her grandmother during an .
"First of all, she gets really upset when I get called 'Carrie Fisher's daughter.' She wants people to call me 'Debbie Reynolds' granddaughter,'" Lourd told the late-night host. "It's very offensive to her. She does not like to be cut out — not at all. She started it. It's her fault."
Lourd explained that her whole family was apprehensive about her getting into acting — particularly Reynolds, who starred in iconic '50s and '60s films like The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Singin' in the Rain.
"She called me down to her house and had this binder of these diaries that she had written when she first started doing Singin' in the Rain. She sat me down on her couch and said, 'okay, I need you to read these, dear' — in her '50s actress voice," Lourd said. "I started reading them and they're all in second person. They are somewhere along the lines of, 'You're sitting in the makeup chair. It's five in the morning. They've pulled out all your eyebrows and you have no eyelashes left. Your hair is a shell of itself, and all you wanted to be is a gym teacher.' So, I read this out loud and kind of looked at her like, 'Okay…?'"
Lourd continued: "She looked at me so earnestly, with her hands crossed in her lap, and was like, 'Are you sure you still want to be an actress, dear?' I was like, 'Yeah, I think it's different now. I think I'm going to be able to keep my eyebrows. I don't think they're going to put a wig on me; I've got long hair. It's fine. I'm going to go for it.'"
But Reynolds loved the Fox series Lourd landed.
"She is a huge fan. She's a fan of anything that involves a lot of fur," Lourd said. "She misses that in film and TV, so the fact that we're all clad in fur earmuffs and fur jackets, it's her dream show."
Reynolds died December 28, just one day after her daughter, Fisher, at the age of 84.