Dan Aykroyd Pens Tribute to Ex-Fiancee Carrie Fisher
Aykroyd looks back at his short-lived romance with the actress.
— -- Weeks after losing "Star Wars" icon Carrie Fisher, the tributes continue to roll in for the actress, writer and activist.
Another Hollywood legend, Dan Aykroyd, 64, penned an op-ed for Empire Magazine about the woman he was engaged to in the early 1980's but never married.
"You can imagine how much of a privilege and honour it was for me to have known this one-off, broke-the-mould woman," he wrote after explaining his humble beginnings as a kid from Canada.
"I met Carrie at 'Saturday Night Live.' She and John Belushi became instant pals. I remember how much she made him laugh. Later, while filming 'Blues Brothers,' Carrie and I fell in love and during the shoot she moved in with me," he added.
In fact, Fisher once said the engagement happened while Aykroyd was filming the classic hit movie.
"He proposed in the trailer on set," she told the Chicago Tribune in 2008, adding a charming story abut her choking while eating right before the proposal. "He thought I was laughing, and then he saw that I was dying, and he did the Heimlich maneuver, and then like 10 minutes later he asked me to marry him, and I thought, 'I better marry him. What if that happens again?' ... But then I got back together with Paul Simon."
Aykroyd noted in his tribute that he gave her a "sapphire ring" and she gave him back a "Donald Roller Wilson oil painting of a monkey in a blue dress next to a tiny floating pencil, which I kept for years until it began to frighten my children."
The tribute was filled with a mixture of humor and sincere admiration for the actress, who died on Dec. 27 at the age of 60, days after suffering a cardiac arrest while on a flight.
"One of the most brilliant and hilarious minds of our eon, Carrie would say things like: 'I love tiny babies. When they cry they turn red and look like screaming tomatoes,'" he wrote.
With a more serious tone, Aykroyd added, "Carrie embraced my friends and I was embraced in warmly human and Hollywood-glamorous emotional comfort, elegance and excitement. Debbie would cook for us and Carrie’s tech-wizard brother Todd would take me on high-intensity cruises in muscle cars and on motorcycles through Beverly Hills with great young people."
Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, died following a stroke at the age of 84 the day after her daughter died.
In one anecdote, the actor reminisces about a trip he took with Fisher to stay on a grand estate in Lake Tahoe owned by the businessman Bill Harrah.
"At this point our love was soaring on laugh-filled exhilaration and a vibrant, wholly satisfying physical intimacy," he wrote, adding it was one of the "planet’s greatest occasions" where some mind-altering drugs were present.
After one final weekend, Aykroyd said Fisher flew back to New York and that was the end of that, right before she got back together with her eventual husband, Simon.
"She married him but I hope she kept my ring," he closed.