Introduced in the original 1977 film 

Star Wars,[c] Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan is a member of the Imperial

Senate. She is captured by Darth Vader (portrayed by David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones) on board the
ship Tantive IV, where she is acting as a spy for the Rebel Alliance. Leia has secretly hidden the blueprints for
the Death Star, the Empire's moon-sized battle station, inside the astromech droid R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and has
sent it to find one of the last remaining Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), on the nearby planet of Tatooine.
Vader arrests Leia and has her tortured, but she resists revealing anything. Death Star commander Grand Moff
Tarkin (Peter Cushing) threatens to destroy her home planet Alderaan with the Death Star unless she reveals the
location of the hidden Rebel base. She provides the location of an old, abandoned base on the planet Dantooine,
but Tarkin orders Alderaan to be destroyed anyway. Leia is rescued by Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Han
Solo (Harrison Ford), and they escape aboard Han's ship, the Millennium Falcon. After analyzing the Death Star's
schematics, the Rebels find a tiny weakness in the battle station, which Luke uses to destroy it in his X-wing. In the
aftermath of the victory, Leia bestows medals on the heroes at the hidden Rebel base on Yavin 4.
Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post writes of Leia in the film:
Leia's nerves as a revolutionary are clear from the moment she arrives on screen ... She takes shots at the Storm
Troopers boarding her ship, gets stunned with a blaster in her hand, then has the audacity to try to make Darth
Vader feel ashamed of himself ... She has enough energy left over after a nasty session of torture to insult Grand
Moff Tarkin. And while she grieves when her home planet, Alderaan, is destroyed by the Death Star, Leia's not
paralyzed: when her unexpected rescuers show up, she’s ready to go, and to gripe about their operational
sloppiness.[33]