Carrie Fisher will be honored at the 10th annual Oscar Wilde Awards, which will be hosted by her Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams. This while her daughter Billie Lourd is set to make her acting debut.
The Oscar Wilde Awards were created by the nonprofit US-Ireland Alliance to honor Irish people in film and television. Fisher, whose father actor Eddie Fisher was Jewish, has Irish ancestry on her mother’s side.
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“My great, great, fabulous grandfather Burt McReynolds from the county Donegal was wrongfully accused of being a horse thief, a case of mistaken identity, ” Fisher told US-Ireland Alliance president Trina Vargo.
“But rather than put his family through the rigors of a trial to clear the family name, he emigrated to America, dropped the ‘Mc’ in the ocean, became Burt Reynolds and the rest is history…and incredibly boring. Thankfully, my mother changed all that and gave our family name a kick in the pants that it might or might not deserve.”
This year’s awards will also honor incoming Late Show on CBS host Stephen Colbert who also has Irish ancestry.
The Oscar Wilde event has become known for its casual atmosphere and for also introducing Irish performers to a broader audience. Performers this year include singer-songwriters Gavin James and Megan O’Neill. Previous recipients and presenters have included Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Fiona Shaw, Hylda Queally, Brian Burns, Paul Rudd, James L. Brooks, Michelle Williams, Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Anjelica Huston, Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, and Kate Winslet.
The 10th annual Oscar Wilde Awards will be held on February 19th in Santa Monica.
Meanwhile Fisher’s 22 year old daughter, Billie Lourd, is set to make her acting debut with a small part in the new Star Wars movie as well as a regular part in the new television series Scream Queens.
Scream Queens is a show based on the concept of the slasher movies of the 1970s in which a series of murders take place on a college campus. The world’s biggest scream queen, Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Tony Curtis (AKA Burney Schwartz), also stars.
The show’s other stars include Abigail Breslin and Emma Roberts. It will premiere later this year.
