Perhaps the most surprising thing is that it has taken Carrie Fisher so long to fess up. 

The famously candid actor and memoirist has been asked numerous times whether there was a real-life romance on the set of Star Wars, to mirror the relationship between Princess Leia and Han Solo.

No, of course not, she would invariably reply: she was a teenager, Harrison Ford was 14 years older, they couldn’t have been more different, what a daft idea.

Now she has written The Princess Diarist, in which she calls on the journals she wrote at the time, to reveal that she had an intense affair with Ford. 

The diaries, and accompanying poems, make for painful reading. 

Here is a 19-year-old riddled with self-loathing and angst, already in therapy but yet to be diagnosed as bipolar, pretending to be a woman of the world. 

She falls obsessively in love with Ford, who, while happy to sleep with her, does not appear to feel the same way.

Fisher has always written about herself with self-lacerating honesty (notably in Postcards From The Edge, the fictionalised account of an overdose). Why has she waited so long to tell this story? A number of reasons, she says, talking down the line to me from Los Angeles, her voice thick with bronchitis (our interview in London was cancelled when she fell ill). The most important was the discovery of the journals, which she found in boxes under the floorboards when she was renovating her house. “I hadn’t seen them in 40 years. After all this time, I had genuinely forgotten they existed. And I thought they were this incredible archaeological find.”

Enough time has passed, she says, to enable her to tell the story. “It wasn’t just my secret to keep,” she says, meaning that Ford was married at the time of their affair, to Mary Marquardt. Shortly afterwards, he divorced, and married ET screenwriter Melissa Mathison, a close friend of Fisher’s, who died last year. Was it out of respect for Mathison that she did not write about their relationship? “No, not at all. Melissa always felt it was not that big of a deal. But then she wasn’t the wife.”

Is she doing it for the money? Fisher laughs. “Oh, it wasn’t that much money. I had a pre-established deal, so it wasn’t like they said, ‘We’ll pay you a million dollars to tell some secret thing.’ I was just wondering if I’d have the nerve to do it.”

Rereading her diaries, Fisher says she was startled by her passion. It enabled her to write about herself in a way she never has before – not sugar-glazed with irony or wisecracks, but straight from the heart. Her daughter, Billie Lourd, read it with her for the audiobook, and “she thought it was so emotional, she had never seen me like that. No one has. This is the most personal thing I have written.”

One of the questions she repeatedly asks herself in the diaries is whether Ford has a clue how she feels. What does she think now? “I don’t think, until now, he knew the intensity of my feelings.” As for herself, she says she has probably tried to bury those emotions over the years. “Even in the diary I don’t like to admit it, because it’s a failure.” She pauses, and starts again. “No, it’s not a failure – it’s unreciprocated love.” Another pause. “Which I guess is a type of failure.”

I ask her what Ford, now married to the actor Calista Flockhart, thinks of the book. She says she doesn’t know. “I told him I was writing the book, and I would give it to him and if he didn’t like anything in it I would take it out, and he seemed surprised at that. Then I called him and said I’m going to send it to you, and I did and I never heard from him.”

She knows he is unlikely to thank her for making the story public. Ford is as taciturn as she is garrulous, as private as she is confessional. “I don’t think he wants anything known about his life,” she admits, “and he’s lived it accordingly. I certainly don’t want to say anything that would do more than embarrass him. Anything private embarrasses him.”

The affair with Ford took her by surprise. “I was shocked by the fact that he fancied me. I was a very insecure girl and had only had one boyfriend.” She writes that he whisked her off when she was tipsy, and asks herself whether he took advantage of her. What does she think now? “Oh no, never. It wasn’t that kind of thing at all.” In fact, she says, there was no way he could have known how innocent she was, because she had deliberately painted a false picture of herself. “He perceived me as this very confident, experienced girl. I don’t think he had all the information! And when he got it, he behaved accordingly, and he didn’t have to do that.”

In what way? “He softened a bit, you know, to the degree that Harrison can soften. And we stayed together for the remainder of the film. It was never going to be more than that. I didn’t think it was going to be even that.”

While Ford was the number one thing on her mind throughout filming, she reckons she was probably around 15th on his list of priorities. She often sounds desolate in the journals. “I do not want to take part in my life,” she writes. “It can just go on without me.” Was she suicidal? “No, I was never suicidal. I was just extremely insecure, especially around men.”

Yes, she says, there is a huge amount of pain there, but some of it is teenage angst and some of it was a reflection of her mental health. “I think some of that could have been being bipolar, though I hadn’t been diagnosed then. I had started going to therapy when I was 15. I realised something was a little too much with me. The doctor said, ‘Why are you here?’ and I said, ‘I want to stop crying so hard.’”

The affair with Ford took her by surprise. “I was shocked by the fact that he fancied me. I was a very insecure girl and had only had one boyfriend.” She writes that he whisked her off when she was tipsy, and asks herself whether he took advantage of her. What does she think now? “Oh no, never. It wasn’t that kind of thing at all.” In fact, she says, there was no way he could have known how innocent she was, because she had deliberately painted a false picture of herself. “He perceived me as this very confident, experienced girl. I don’t think he had all the information! And when he got it, he behaved accordingly, and he didn’t have to do that.”

In what way? “He softened a bit, you know, to the degree that Harrison can soften. And we stayed together for the remainder of the film. It was never going to be more than that. I didn’t think it was going to be even that.”

While Ford was the number one thing on her mind throughout filming, she reckons she was probably around 15th on his list of priorities. She often sounds desolate in the journals. “I do not want to take part in my life,” she writes. “It can just go on without me.” Was she suicidal? “No, I was never suicidal. I was just extremely insecure, especially around men.”

Yes, she says, there is a huge amount of pain there, but some of it is teenage angst and some of it was a reflection of her mental health. “I think some of that could have been being bipolar, though I hadn’t been diagnosed then. I had started going to therapy when I was 15. I realised something was a little too much with me. The doctor said, ‘Why are you here?’ and I said, ‘I want to stop crying so hard.’”

Was he as good in bed as you’d expect Harrison Ford to be? Fisher gasps with faux shock. “Oh come on, I can’t answer that question! I was very infatuated with him. Look at him. Look at those pictures of him. Can you imagine what I thought, given what I thought of myself?” How does she feel, looking back at her teenage self now? “I felt sorry for myself, and I don’t like that at any age.” She says she’s thankful that, at 60, she is not so lacking in self-belief.

I ask if her relationship with Ford shaped future relationships. “Freakishly, yes.” How? “Well, I went with Paul after that, and Paul was not dissimilar.” Fisher dated Paul Simon for six years, was married to him for 11 months, and then dated him again after they divorced. “Paul was much more verbal. But there was something very diffident again. He was the same amount older. I was 21 and Paul was 36. They were both very cerebral and serious. And they were witty, which is different from being funny. Funny, there’s a sort of pleading in it. Witty is a much more cerebral self-expression. They both had that. And they’re both better after a couple of beers.” She says there was one crucial difference in her relationship with Simon. “This time it was reciprocal, which was a huge relief.”

What astonishes me is that Fisher says she and Ford never discussed their relationship, neither at the time nor afterwards. “He’s not a big talker,” she says drily. “You know, he wasn’t Mr Chuckles.” But what happened when they met on set for the sequels – The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. Nothing, she says; it was just their secret. “I think it was reabsorbed. You can see in our body language that we are comfortable with each other.”

Last year they were reunited as characters for the first time in 30 years, forStar Wars: The Force Awakens. Surely by then they could talk about it? “No,” she says. “On this last film I noticed that two people were flirting and they had a big age difference like we had, and I pointed it out to him, and he said [she puts on his deep-voice deadpan], ‘Well, I hope it goes well for them.’ I think it’s the only time we’ve ever referred to it.” Did he wink? “No. He’s not a wink person.”

What did emerge over the years, she thinks, was a lasting friendship. Recently, she told Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, about her affair with Ford. How did he react? “He was shocked.” Does she still love Ford? “Yes, I love him. I’ll always feel something for him. I love Mark, too, but I love Mark more like a sibling. You can’t pretend something for so long without some of it coming true.”

For a long time, Fisher had been ambivalent about the Star Wars franchise. Yes, it had made her, but it had also stultified her – for many people, she will always be Princess Leia. Now, she is simply thankful. “It has been an enormous thing in my life. And it’s been the motor that’s run everything else.”

As for her current not-so-private life, she lives with her dog, Gary Fisher (who has his own Twitter account), is single, looking to move to Britain (particularly post-Trump) and is more than ready for another man. “I want to find a British professor who will be able to put up with me, so you can put the word out. Good sense of humour, intelligent, not hideously unattractive, and sort of confident without being arrogant.”

I ask if she will be embarrassed next time she meets Ford. “Yeah, I’ll be embarrassed,” she says. How long for? “Not that long. I think it’s worth a flush or two!” She laughs.

I tell her that, as she has been talking, I’ve been picturingthat scene in The Empire Strikes Back, where Princess Leia finally professes her feelings to Han Solo. “I love you,” she says. “I know,” he replies. It feels so true to life, I say. “Yes,” she says, “I think that’s definitely informed by our relationship. It is much more me to say, ‘I love you’ and much more him to say the other. He improvised his bit.”

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