Unidentified female (Anchorhead)

"I've told you kids to slow down!"

―The woman, to Luke Skywalker

A Human female lived in the settlement of Anchorhead on the Outer Rim planet Tatooine. She was aged by the time of the Battle of Yavin, and she wore a metallic sun shawl to protect herself from the twin suns of the Tatoo system.

Late in 0 BBY, the woman was walking on a quiet, deserted street of Anchorhead when she was nearly run over by Luke Skywalker, the nephew of a local moisture farmer named Owen Lars. The farmboy was on his way to the Tosche power station in his X-34 landspeeder to relate a battle which he had spotted over their planet to his friends. The surprised woman quickly ran out of Skywalker's way and shouted after him, shaking her fist at the boy.

Behind the scenes

"Won't you kids ever learn to slow down!"

―The woman's line in the novelization of A New Hope

The woman appeared simply as "Woman" in the final script of the 1977 original trilogy film, Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. The character was played by a local Tunisian woman, and her scene was filmed during principal photography in front of a mosque in Djerba, Tunisia, on April 4, 1976. Director George Lucas cut the scene before the release of the film, and no image of the scene was released until the 1998 forty-first issue of the Star Wars Insider magazine published a still from it in the article "The Evolution of Star Wars: Exploring the Lost Cut," which raised the filmed version of the scene to G-canon status, the highest level of canonicity in the Star Wars Legends continuity.

The old woman in Star Wars 1

The woman was also featured in three sources that adapted A New Hope. Her first appearance, in which she uttered a slightly different line from the one spoken in the cut scene, was in the December 1976 novelization of A New Hope by Alan Dean Foster. She uttered the same line as in the script in two later sources: the first issue of Marvel Comics' Star Wars series, published April 12, 1977, and the junior novel A New Hope: The Life of Luke Skywalker, written by Ryder Windham and published in 2009. As the latter two sources use the script-accurate line, this article assumes that the novelization is in error.

Appearances

• Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope novel (First appearance)
• Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (Appears in deleted scene(s))
• Star Wars (1977) 1
• A New Hope: The Life of Luke Skywalker

Sources

• The Art of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
• Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
• Star Wars: Behind the Magic
• "The Evolution of Star Wars: Exploring the Lost Cut" – Star Wars Insider 41
• The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film