A&E

Carrie Fisher’s Iberian connection

by Mike Stagg

Fisher is survived by her 24-year-old daughter Billie Catherine Lourd. Lourd’s father is New Iberia native Bryan Lourd, who for the past two decades has earned a reputation as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.

For those of you in the know (this writer excluded), the sudden death of 60-year-old actor, screenwriter and author Carrie Fisher on Tuesday surely brought reminders of her Iberia Parish connection.

Fisher is survived by her 24-year-old daughter Billie Catherine Lourd. Lourd’s father is New Iberia native Bryan Lourd, who for the past two decades has earned a reputation as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. Bryan Lourd has been co-chairman, managing director and partner at Creative Artists Agency, a Los Angeles-based talent and sports agency, since 1995.

Lourd and Fisher never married.

Billie Lourd, like her mother, is an actor and had a cameo role with her mother in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The Los Angeles Times reports that both Fisher and Billie Lourd appear in the already completed Episode VIII of the Star Wars series scheduled for release in December 2017. She currently stars as Chanel #3 in the Fox TV series Scream Queens.

She’s a 2014 graduate of New York University where, IMDb reports, she studied religion and psychology.

When Billie Lourd was born on July 17, 1992, Fisher announced her birth with a poem, which she included in her first memoir, Wishful Drinking:

Someone summered in my stomach.
Someone’s fallen through my legs.
To make an infant omelette,
Simply scramble sperm and eggs.

Bryan Lourd is the son of Sherion (Brice) and the late Harvey H. “Puffer” Lourd, a New Iberia oilman who founded L&M Specialties, a drilling consultant firm. Puffer Lourd died in Los Angeles in 2011. Sherion Lourd still lives in New Iberia. Bryan’s brother, Blaine Lourd, a financial consultant with offices in Los Angeles and Baton Rouge, wrote about growing up in New Iberia in the oil patch in his 2015 book Born on the Bayou, which was published by Simon & Schuster. Both of Bryan's other two siblings, Deborah Lourd and Harvey "Tutu" Lourd III, still live in New Iberia.

Born in 1960, Bryan graduated from NISH and headed to Southern California. He earned a communications degree from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 1982.

Fisher had an extended relationship with singer/songwriter Paul Simon during the 1980s, and while they eventually married, the marriage only lasted a year. “It was a beautiful wedding but a bad marriage,” Simon later famously said.

Billie Lourd plays Chanel #3 on the TV series "Scream Queens"

Her relationship with Bryan Lourd began after her divorce from Simon. The Los Angeles Times reports that Fisher and Lourd never married, although Lourd did give her a ring at one point. They were together for three years, according to the UK’s Daily Mail.

They broke up after Billie’s birth when Bryan announced he was bisexual. Fisher later wrote in Wishful Drinking that Lourd claimed Fisher’s drug use led to his bisexuality: “He told me later that I had turned him gay ... by taking codeine again. And I said, ‘You know, I never read that warning on the label. I thought it said ‘heavy machinery,’ not homosexuality — turns out I could have been driving those tractors all along!’”

In October of this year, Bryan married Bruce Bozzi in a civil ceremony at the Beverly Hills courthouse. Bozzi is the co-owner of The Palm restaurant chain, which has 28 international locations.

Bryan is active in Democratic politics, having raised funds for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign. He is also a fundraiser for LGBT rights, according to the Hollywood Reporter.