"Receiving all of your prayers and kind words over the past week has given me strength during a time I thought strength could not exist. There are no words to express how much I will miss my Abadaba and my one and only Momby. Your love and support means the world to me," she wrote on Instagram alongside a picture of the three of them together.

Fisher, best known for playing Princess Leia in Star Wars, died unexpectedly last Tuesday at the age of 60 after suffering what has been described as a massive heart attack four days earlier while on a flight from London to Los Angeles.

Her mother, Singin' in the Rain star, Reynolds, 84, passed away the next day from a stroke.

In comparison to her famously open matriarchs, not much is known about the private life of 24-year-old Lourd, who had been slowly building up her acting resume with parts in the 2015 Star Wars sequel film The Force Awakens and black comedy Scream Queens before becoming a household name in the last week as a result of the family tragedy.

Acting is in her genes, and although her parents Fisher and LA's biggest talent agent Bryan Lourd, 56, wanted her to pursue a career outside of Hollywood, it was her calling.

"[Acting] has been a secret dream of mine," Lourd told Interview Magazine in April 2015. "My whole life, [my family] said, 'Do not act. You need to get a college degree.'"

While she told Late Night with Seth Meyers on December 12: "When I first started acting, everyone in my family did not want me to act, it was like, 'I am really rebelling by doing this.'"

She recalled Reynolds making her read an excerpt from "binders of diaries that she had written when she first started doing Singin' in the Rain," hoping to dissuade her granddaughter from following in the family business.

Reynolds had written about a moment when she found herself in the makeup chair at 5am and they had pulled out all of her eyebrows, she had no eyelashes left and her hair was a "shell of itself," and she asked Lourd: "Are you sure you still want to be an actress, dear?" She did.

Reynolds turned into one of her biggest fans. "She's a fan of anything that involves a lot of fur. She misses that in film and TV. So the fact that we're all clad in fur ear muffs and fur jackets, it's her dream show," Lourd joked.

After graduating from New York University with a degree in religion and psychology in 2014, Lourd landed a small part opposite her mother as Lieutenant Kaydel Ko Connix in Star Wars - the first set she had ever been on; and she claims no one knew of her Hollywood royalty blue blood. She would travel with the extras, and tried not to speak to Fisher on set. When she had to, she would refer to her as "Carrie" instead of "Mum".

"I wanted to be human, not 'Carrie Fisher's daughter,'" she told Today last month.

Even at the age of two, Fisher could see herself in her only child.

"We are all bossy. [Speaking to Reynolds] Grandmother is extremely bossy, you are, I am and now Billie is. This is what she says: 'No work'; 'Get off the phone'; 'Come play,'" she told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.

At the time, shortly after Billie's father left her for a man and Fisher went back to work, she was worried Lourd would feel abandoned, like she had felt by Reynolds.

"I worried that I would neglect her at close range, because I am a working mother. I know that she will feel somewhat neglected, but she really won't be aware of it until she gets to be 13 or 14 - that's when I got very resentful of my mother's work. But I also have an obligation to a mortgage," she told the same publication, as she sat and fed Lourd sweet potato.

Lourd is expected to inherit Fisher's estimated $AU34 million fortune and also a piece of her grandmother's approximate $84 million.

Unlike Fisher's open-book nature, Lourd has learned to keep much to herself. In numerous television interviews she regales similar stories about what it's like being Princess Leia's daughter or how her grandmother would prefer she is referred to as "Debbie Reynolds' granddaughter" instead of "Carrie Fisher's daughter".

Fisher's colourful life was well documented in her books, with particular fascination on her romances with the likes of Paul Simon, Dan Aykroyd, and Harrison Ford; but Lourd has yet to publicly speak about her rumoured boyfriend, Taylor Lautner, whom she co-stars with on Scream Queens.

But despite their differences, acting is not the only thing Fisher passed down. Lourd's sharp wit shines through in interviews, on social media, and particularly through her role as Chanel No. 3 in Scream Queens where she pays homage to Princess Leia's cinnamon buns by always wearing furry earmuffs.

She has two more movies due out this year - Star Wars: Episode VIII and Billionaire Boys Club - but has also taken on arguably her most important role to date: custodian of Fisher's beloved French bulldog, Gary Fisher, a registered therapy canine that helped her cope with her bipolar disorder.