America loses its princess and its sweetheart as mother Debbie Reynolds outlives daughter Carrie Fisher by one day

First, America lost its princess. Then, it lost its sweetheart.

The death of Debbie Reynolds, following Carrie Fisher’s, isn’t fair. It’s not supposed to be like that — not just for movie fans, but in real life. Mothers aren’t supposed to outlive their daughters — even if it's by a day and a half.

But that’s the grim kind of year 2016 has been.

And so Reynolds — the perky star of “Singin’ in the Rain” and innocent victim in the old, endless Liz Taylor/Eddie Fisher headlines — has followed Fisher, the sarcastic lead in the “Star Wars” series (and survivor of endless rehab stories). 

The only thing lessening the pain of the cruel one-two punch is imagining Carrie in some better place far, far away, sardonically acknowledging it all.

Really, Mom? Seriously? You had to try and upstage me with this, too?

They were a loving mother and daughter, yes, but they were consummate performers, too — both since they were teens, both ruling different decades.

Their close, but competitive, relationship inspired Fisher’s novel “Postcards from the Edge,” the movie adaptation and even a recent documentary.

Their affection was real, but so was its occasional, slight, get-out-of-my-spotlight edge.

“People used to call her ‘Debbie Reynolds’ daughter,’ ” Reynolds, who was 84, said once, “now they call me ‘Princess Leia’s mother!’ ”

The smile was as genuine as she could make it, but the sharpness was still palpable. Of course, their bond went deeper than that, and in ways mere movie fans can never understand. Because no one else can really know what it was like to be in the midst of the Fisher-Taylor love triangle back in the ’50s, a kind of run-through for Jennifer-Brad-Angelina that played out self-righteously on shocked movie-mag covers.

The scandal only furthered Taylor’s bad-girl image, but it ruined Eddie Fisher’s career and helped drive Reynolds into another lousy marriage. It also gave Carrie Fisher an attitude — and material for years.

“My father was best friends with a man named Michael Todd,” Carrie Fisher explained once. “Mike Todd was married to Elizabeth Taylor. Mike Todd died in a plane crash, and my father consoled Elizabeth Taylor with his penis.” Reading her father’s torrid autobiography, she later confessed, made her want to “have my DNA fumigated.”

But the jokes came later. At the time, the poor publicity abandoned Debbie, Carrie and her brother Todd — until Liz Taylor dumped Eddie for Richard Burton, and a new scandal took its place.

No one can fully know what that mother-daughter experience was like. Just as no one can quite understand what it was like to be starting your own movie career (that’s Carrie playing the teen temptress in “Shampoo”) just as your mom had seen hers begin to wind down (in the horror schlocker “What’s the Matter With Helen?”)

But what we can all understand, and share, is what these women meant to different generations at different times.

Because if you were a child of the ’50s, Debbie Reynolds was wholesome optimism personified — cheerfully singing out “Good Morning” in “Singin’ in the Rain,” strumming her guitar as “The Singing Nun” and surviving even the Titanic as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

And when the movie career ended, the eternally plucky star moved to TV. When the studios started throwing out their own history, and ours, she scooped up the memories, and started a museum.

Meanwhile, if you were a ’70s kid, Carrie Fisher, who was 60 when she died, was feminism made fun — taking sarcastic charge in the first “Star Wars,” and taking no nonsense from the males around her. True, she never got a light saber. But she didn’t need one to stand up to Darth Vader or put Han Solo in his place.

When Jabba the Hutt tried to turn her into a cheap sex symbol, she grabbed those chains back — and used them to strangle him.

Later decades provided new struggles for both women. An aging Reynolds had to fight to support herself, after her second husband ripped her off and her industry wrote her off. Fisher battled mental illness, substance abuse and bad marriages.

It wasn’t fair. They had only wanted to act. They hadn’t set out to be role models, and their lives were proof that roles were sometimes only that.

Yet their struggles — Reynolds' middle-aged need to reinvent herself; Fisher’s fight against loneliness and drugs — mirrored the struggles of their generations.

If things got confused for them, they had gotten confused for a lot of us, too. We could identify with the way both ladies fought on, and kept going, and kept their sense of humor — about themselves, each other, and their own relationship.

And now console ourselves with knowing that they went out as they would have liked. Still competing. Still on top. Still together.

Whitty is a longtime movie critic.