Billie Lourd is opening up about keeping her late mother and grandmother's legacies alive.
Just months after losing Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds within days of each other, Lourd is opening up about making a name for herself in the wake of their deaths in a new conversation featured in September's issue of Town and Country.
“I’ve always kind of lived in their shadows, and now is the first time in my life when I get to own my life and stand on my own,” Lourd said. “I love being my mother’s daughter, and it’s something I always will be, but now I get to be just Billie.
"It's a lot of pressure, because she had such an incredible legacy, and now I have to uphold that and make it evolve in my own way," Lourd told her "American Horror Story" costar Sarah Paulson. Lourd has been working hard on her own career by taking on roles in two of Ryan Murphy's projects, "Scream Queens" and the upcoming season of "American Horror Story."
Since losing both of the leading women in her life, Lourd said she has been getting through it all by remembering her mother’s infectious sense of humor.
"If life's not funny, then it's just true – and that would be unacceptable," Lourd said, echoing a maxim of Fisher's. "Even when she [Fisher] died, that was what got me through that whole thing. When Debbie died the next day, I could just picture her saying, 'Well, she's upstaging me once again, of course – she had to.'"
Fisher died after suffering a heart attack on an airplane from London to Los Angeles. After her death, a toxicology report revealed the late actress had drugs in her system at the time of her death. One day after Fisher died, Reynolds suffered a stroke and died.
Both actresses were buried at Hollywood's Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A large marble memorial sculpture of a mother and daughter was unveiled in their memory in May.
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