Also, I think I've mentioned it before, but in the SW third draft Leia is described as "bloody and mutilated" from Imperial torture when Luke and Han find her.

Given Lucas's love of Kurosawa films, this was probably imagined as a reference to the nasty black eye that we see on Toshiro Mifune when he's beaten up in Yojimbo (as well as on Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's remake, A Fistful of Dollars).

Which basically means Leia would be walking around with an eye swollen shut for the whole second half of the movie. Gruesome, but on both a literal and symbolic level it would instantly establish Leia as the toughest of the film's three heroes.