One day in 1997, Kim Cattrall received a script for Sex And The City. Darren Star, the producer, wanted her to audition for the role of Samantha, a premier-league slapper who chases blokes around Manhattan looking for the holy grail of the Modern Miss – an enormous willy (”Ding ding ding, jackpot!” she says when she finds it, in what I believe is the show’s most charming moment). Her fiancé at the time, the actor Daniel Benzali, was so against the idea that she read the script in secret, liked it, walked out on him and took the part. Maybe she was bored with him, anyway – or maybe she realised that the show was going to bring about a revolution in her career, the like of which just doesn’t happen in the acting universe.
It sometimes happens that an actor in her 40s gets bumped from B list to A list, when a whole new range of auntie/mum roles becomes available to her, at which point she is no longer automatically pipped to the part by the prettier, not-necessarily-more-talented rival. But rarely, if ever, does the casting world wait until you’re 42 before it realises what a quintessential sex bomb you are.
With great serendipity, all Cattrall’s psychic demons and niggling insecurities chose exactly this time to disappear. As she puts it, turning her faintly arch eyes upon me, ”I’m so much happier now than I’ve ever been. Being in your 20s and 30s can be very hard. In your 40s, you know more about yourself, you’ve done the work and you’re conscious. In your 20s, you’re always in a hurry to get somewhere else. And you’re always grasping for trademarks because they mean so much to you. I remember wanting a Cartier watch so badly. And some special Adidas. Now I don’t really care about things .”
To swallow the anomaly of a person’s life genuinely beginning at 40, many point to how amazingly youthful Cattrall is, how slender and perky. In the flesh, she certainly has a fantastic figure, lithe but not at all like a chicken wing (in stark contrast to the rest of the Sex And The City cast). She has a beautiful face and an intermittently winning manner. She ”takes pride in her appearance”, as a 1950s magazine would have it. ”I work out, I eat well. I play Samantha, I think that she looks great, but I don’t go overboard,” she says somewhat defensively, as if I might accuse her of being anorexic. Which, of course, I’m not – I watch a lot of telly. I know the difference between Ally McBeal and Sex And The City.
Cattrall was born in Liverpool in 1956 and emigrated to Canada with her parents three months later. She spent another year and a half in England, from the age of 10, returned to America to attend a swish drama school, and at 17 won a part in Otto Preminger’s Rosebud, a film about a gang of Palestinian terrorists who seize a yacht. But most hardline Cattrall fans fell in love with her in Mannequin, the 1980s romantic comedy based on the slightly dubious premise that, if only a shop dummy were mobile and made of real flesh, she’d make the ideal love-mate.
She made a small comic splash in Police Academy, did her bit for the indifferently-received-but-really-quite-good Bonfire Of The Vanities, and was a properly vampish vampire in a truly dreadful film called The Revenant (aka Modern Vampires). If we’re honest, she has not made many good career decisions: a lot of her films have a touch of the Pearl Harbor about them. That is, critically speaking, they could have gone either way – and they ended up going the wrong way.
Perhaps the curmudgeonly Preminger is to blame for all this. Asked about Rosebud, Cattrall immediately says, ”Rose dud , we called it”, like a surly teen sharing her nickname for the maths teacher. ”It was a nightmare, it was baptism by fire. I was 17 [Preminger was 69], I hadn’t seen The Man With The Golden Arm, or Laura, or any of those films, and I didn’t realise what an innovative, brilliant film-maker Preminger was. All I knew was that he was very, very important, and he seemed to be screaming and yelling all the time. There’s a film called Gulag 17, which he was in, playing a Nazi commandant – and I felt like we were really living it.” The mighty Otto badgered her constantly to lose weight (”I was a normal 17-year-old! I wasn’t skinny, I was a normal person”) and didn’t find it remotely amusing when she laughed every time he called ”Action”. ”Well, I thought that was really funny. I thought they only ever said that in films made about films. I thought in real films, they said something like, ‘When you’re ready.”’
After this horror, Cattrall went back to the theatre for three years, taking the odd television ad for cash. Although she went on to make plenty more films, she appears to have fallen slightly out of love with the medium. Asked which is the favourite of all her films, she says Ticket To Heaven, an 1980s movie about religious cults. It’s not exactly a classic. In the theatre, however, she has given some seminal performances (Masha in Three Sisters, and the title role in Miss Julie) – certainly in her father’s opinion. Last year Dennis Cattrall said publicly that he hated his daughter’s role in Sex And The City, and that she was lowering herself into the gutter after a career full of lofty stage roles. Father and daughter ironed out their differences last August – the rift wasn’t a big deal, apparently, just a spat blown out of proportion by a slow news week. The publicist whispered to me urgently, however, that I mustn’t mention it, so, during the interview and since, I’ve been unable to get it out of my head.
Anyhow, back to 1998, the beginning of Sex And The City, and year zero in Kim Cattrall’s era as a globally famous, universally attested hottie. For those who haven’t seen it, the show is based on the newspaper column by Candace Bushnell, and follows four women of a certain age (Samantha is the oldest by a decade), tripping gaily around Manhattan buying shoes, having sex and wondering what will become of them. Samantha’s role has systematically increased in importance. This is partly, I imagine, because she is by a million miles the funniest, constantly pondering the big issues – What foods make a man’s sperm taste funny? How do you dump an ill-hung bedfellow without naming the reason? How do you get a Catholic priest into the sack? – while the other three mainly whine and moan. Also, she seems to inhabit her role more completely than anyone else, no doubt because she is the superior actor. People call her agent and ask if they can book Samantha for the evening. ”I was asked to do a toast for Hugh Hefner the other evening. And they had an incredible line-up, with all these different comedians, and they wanted Samantha as one of them. But I’m an actor, you know! Don’t they know I’m acting?”
Most importantly, though, Samantha is a truly radical character. Television is full of females who, though they might not wait until marriage, are nevertheless Nice Girls, who rarely have sex without experiencing unending does-he-doesn’t-he? heartache afterwards. Samantha goes out, gets laid, wakes up, has facial, makes fortune, goes out again. Sex is without negative consequence for her; she is true to the age-old TV prototype of the loveable rogue, but for one small difference – she is female. As Cattrall says, ”I don’t think there’s ever been a woman who has expressed so much sexual joy [on television] without her being punished. I never tire of women coming up and saying, ‘You’ve affected my life.”’
This is groundbreaking stuff, the idea that female emancipation can’t be complete until female promiscuity is viewed with the same fond indulgence as the male kind. Cattrall herself, however, turns out to be slightly hazy as to whether or not her character’s no-strings congress goes unpunished. ”If you get to know the character, and you see the underbelly of all that she is, it’s a horrible life to be single and unfulfilled, for all women. I don’t know if you’ve read Bushnell’s original book, but it’s devastating. To be single in New York is a very painful experience. It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing. I mean, it’s a colourful journey, there are great shoes and bags and dresses, but most of us want to find fulfilment in our relationships. That’s the foundation, for most people, of a happy life. And this character is really struggling with it.”
What, she’s struggling as a consequence of her sexual liberation?
”Well, it’s a consequence of… look where we are! We’re spending more time in front of our television sets than we are getting together. That’s the terrific thing about this show, that people get together to watch it, and they’ll have coffee or dessert afterwards, and it really makes them talk about human things, especially women coming together.” Hmm, so the promiscuous character in Sex And The City is not punished, yet she is miserable outside a relationship, yet she can’t find a relationship because she’s too busy watching telly, except she isn’t, she’s out getting laid. There’s a puzzling blur here between life and art that makes it hard to fathom exactly where Cattrall stands on the sleeping-around issue, but I’d say it boils down to this – it’s great for women to have sex, but we all wanna boyfriend. It’s more Cosmo than Spare Rib, but then you don’t have to be a radical feminist to play one.
In real life, Cattrall met Mark Levinson, now her husband, in a jazz club. She’d been married to an architect, engaged to an actor (the aforementioned Benzali) and linked to a Canadian prime minister (Pierre Trudeau – he was extremely old at the time), but had, pre-Levinson, spent some time dating and hadn’t enjoyed it. Levinson and she both arrived alone – he chatted her up, they talked until 7am, she moved in with him shortly afterwards and they’ve been together ever since. They have fantastic sex – I know this because they are about to publish a book (scheduled to appear in the UK later this year) called Satisfaction: The Art Of The Female Orgasm, which is illustrated in the main by photographs of the pair perfecting aforesaid art. It was turned down by a number of publishers for being too raunchy, before Warner Books took it on. The book led US columnists to start dubbing Levinson ”a Dr Kinsey-lite dude”, which tickled me. I didn’t ask Cattrall about it, again because the publicist had told me not to, but I did come away from the interview in no doubt whatsoever as to the quality of her sex life: ”I think sex should be really fun, and I think it’s an empowering, positive thing for a woman to do. I’ve had that in a relationship, and I’ve not had it in a relationship. And to have it is one of the gifts of life. Of being a woman. That component for me is really part of the glue that keeps my marriage together.”
But besides all the real-life, quotidian contentment, I’m still curious, in a daft way, to know the degree to which she is Samantha. In the sense of, like, being a complete slut, or ever having been one. She looks at me primly. ”I don’t see Samantha as a slut.” Er, okay then (does slut mean something else in America?). How about very promiscuous? ”Of course, I’m curious. I want to find out about my body and men’s bodies, and sexuality. I’ve read books, and I was in therapy for a while. And one of the things that my therapist recommended was just people getting in touch with their bodies.” (This is a strange conversational segue of hers, from ”me” to ”them”; it happens a lot.) ”A lot of people don’t do that, they talk about ‘down there’ or ‘off-limits’ or ‘dirty’, and it’s a constant bewilderment to me that people are not really in touch with their bodies. I think that’s what’s great about Sex And The City; hopefully, we’re raising the bar for honesty.”
It’s true, that is a great thing about the show. I don’t, for instance, think I’ve ever seen another cute, half-hour, prime-time comedy that features a lengthy lady-masturbation scene, even a non-explicit one. What I don’t like about the show is its anti-male thing. The men are outlandishly humourless and shallow, mostly impotent, always full of malice and empty of feeling. It gives Grrrl Power a bad name, when the only part-human men it can envisage are homosexual. It makes feminism look a bit coarse. While this, clearly, isn’t Cattrall’s fault, I posit it anyway, in a nice way: ”There don’t seem to be any inter-gender friendships in the show.”
”Well,” she replies, a bit do-we-have-to-go-through-this-again?, ”I don’t think that’s just a New York thing. I don’t have very many black girlfriends. Most of my friends are from very similar backgrounds. A lot of people have said, ‘Why don’t you have an Afro-American [friend]?’, but that’s not what this story is about.”
Yes. By gender, I kind of meant ”men and women”.
”Right, ask me again,” she says, as though language were infinitely interpretable, and if I want to stick to my interpretation, then she at least has the grace to indulge me.
There seems to be no tenderness between the sexes.
”Well, listen, I’ve done the dating scene, and there isn’t a lot of tenderness there. It was probably one of the most painful things of my life. I felt that men had more control than I did, it was never equal. I’m nothing like Samantha, she’s like the coyote in the cartoon, she’s constantly getting pushed off the cliff and run over, and yet she’s still standing… I think that’s the best way to be – a feminist, to have an agenda, but don’t wear it on your sleeve. Get what you want. Feel that you are in control.”
There are two stock lines about Sex And The City. First, that the reason it’s so comically raunchy – rather than, say, whiny – is that it’s all written by gay men, who don’t have a default Bridget Jones-ishness to slip into. I don’t think this is true, I think it is pretty whiny. But it’s worth asking. ”No, that’s not true. Every year our writers change. I don’t even understand this question all the time, it’s not about gender.”
Right, we’re confusing gender and sexuality now, but we’re getting warmer. ”It’s about whether that person can write. Can they tell the story? I think to write for women is fantastic, because you have so many more colours, emotional colours, you can deal with. And for men, their palette has never been as large, because their emotional sensibility isn’t as bared.”
The other stock line about the show is that the main actors all hate each other. Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie) is too big for her Jimmy Choos, the story goes, and everyone’s in an unseemly rush to get home at the end of the day. This is not so. ”We’re all terrific actresses, but I don’t think we could get that feeling of support if it wasn’t there between the company of actors in the beginning. There’s a support system that’s really good and strong. And I always say to people who ask this, ‘We live in each other’s pockets for six months of the year; the rest of the six months we want to spend with our families. After a nine-hour day, do you go home and have a drink with your boss?’ I mean, The Sopranos has never had any questions asked about whether or not they like each other, because they’re not all women. It just sells papers, the old cliché of women not being supportive to each other. A lot of people are scared of strong women. Women are very powerful.”
Cattrall is slated to do two more series of Sex And The City, and also to appear as Britney Spears’s mother in the feature film, Crossroads (not, incidentally, named after our own classic soap of the same name – Americans never care what meanings their film names have over here: Free Willy and Shag. We, by contrast, dropped the numerals from the title of The Madness Of King George III, in case American audiences thought it was a sequel to George I and George II. Sorry, I digress, but I think we could extrapolate something about our entire lickspittle relationship from this). Bar the fact that Britney plays an intelligent, bookish teen, little is known about the substance of the film, but it’s as good as guaranteed that Cattrall plays no regular mom, and that this isn’t the beginning of her Older-Lady-period.
For all her fictional, carefree slagging about, for her real-life, fairly late reinvention as a superstar, for her pretty handbags (real and make-believe) and sexy nonchalance (ditto), Cattrall is a card-carrying icon these days. She’s taken on the most 21st-century TV character, given her an all-over body buff, and made her more vivid and appealing than anyone could have imagined. If the actor herself is a little more ideologically old-school, less developed in her sense of the absurd than her screen self, she gives no whiff of that while she’s being Samantha, eenie-meenie-miney-moing about who to fellate first at a firemen’s ball.
Well, she’s an actor. Having met her, I’d say an extremely good one. – The Guardian