Kim's deal

Though I personally can’t imagine what the disadvantages of being Too Damned Sexy might be, I’ve heard there are some.

Rita Hayworth famously rued the day she signed on to play the noir siren Gilda. “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda”, she said, “and woke up with me.”
One wonders if Kim Cattrall knows just what she meant.
Don’t get me wrong. When you meet Ms. Cattrall, she’s one of those people that (sickeningly) manage to look even more prepossessing in the flesh. As the Sex And The City stalwart hits the big 5-0, there have been inevitable mutterings about surgical intervention, but if the renovators have been in they’ve done one hell of a job. Even from half a metre away, there are no telltale signs - no Joan Rivers’ Joker mouth, no Nicole Kidman’s recently acquired oriental eyes, not even some Kenny Rogers blowfish botox.
Showing no botched improvements, Kim Cattrall looks exactly as one might suppose – as though she’s come straight by limousine from an impossibly exclusive $1,000 salon, curling tongs at the ready should a single strand dare to stray out of place.
She’s also witty, obliging and far more articulate than the girl from the shower scene in Police Academy has any right to be.
So what’s the problem? Apart from realising I have a ladder in my tights as I sit down beside her? Well, some idiot part of you, the one that refuses to recognise that actors are not, necessarily, synonymous with their best-loved work keeps expecting smutty asides. Though it’s wholly unfair on my part, I was preparing to sip lattes with Mae West.
“No, I’m not Samantha,” smiles Ms Cattrall. “I did not get to live a life of decadence. I can be generous and go on vacations but I am not frivolous. Nor am I a young chicken. I have a huge body of work because I have been at this a long time. But she was the one character captured people’s imagination. I am grateful for it. It could not have happened at a better time to keep challenges going and roles coming. I should just be playing the mom by now.”
I’m not alone in my silly preconceptions. When reviews appeared for her first book, Satisfaction; The Art Of The Female Orgasm, many seemed disappointed that she and co-author Mark Levinson (her third husband, since dismissed) had produced an entirely sensible, holistic guidebook on sex tips for girls.
Readers expected to be told when to insert the anal beads. Instead they were informed that women like a caring partner who says things like – “I’d like to forget about my penis for a while and concentrate on you. If it’s all right with you, could we just take our time and let me feel you more and really get lost in your pleasure.” Fair enough.
“Before it came out there was a lot of speculation and it was so off the mark,” she laughs. “But I didn’t mind. The persona of the book gave me a platform to talk about women and sexuality. It can change for you. It changed for me. Orgasm is fabulous. But it was one thing to talk about it and quite another to write it. I was in the middle of Sex And The City when it went to the publisher. So I was scared. But people like the book and the response was great. I received amazing letters.”
She has since presided over Sexual Intelligence, a second book tied in with a Channel 4/HBO documentary on sex and a third volume on female adolescence is imminent.
“The third is definitely my favourite,” gushes Kim. “Looking back, it is a miserable tough time. When you remember yourself and the confusion and the need to fit in, you just want to reach back to that little girl and say, ‘Relax’. That need to do something different is so desperate.”
Composed, cool and elegant, it’s hard to imagine Kim Cattrall ever suffering through a gawky period. She is, by any account, a committed career gal and an admirable role model for those who would seek refuge in tracksuit bottoms once they hit thirty. Her self-confidence reminds you of the natural authority bestowed on those to the manor born. You have to remind yourself that she is a poster girl for self-realisation, a racy potential spokeswoman for the Jay Gatsby programme.
Born in Liverpool to housewife Shane and construction worker Dennis, Kim Victoria Cattrall’s family moved from Cheshire to British Columbia when she was a year old. When her grandmother became ill, she returned to England for a year at the age of 11. During that time she took lessons at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, an experience that instilled a lifelong passion for theatre.
“Nobody wanted to act in the town where I grew up,” she recalls. “They wanted to be professionals or get married. I wanted to be an actress. It made me an oddball, but I got the bug. But it was not about being a star. It has always been about theatre.”
At 16 she moved to New York to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I’m amazed and terrified. You were how old?
“I know,” she smiles.
And you were living alone?
“Oh yes. I look at my 16 year-old niece now and I think, ‘Oh, but she’s a baby’, but I felt sophisticated at 16. I was ready for it. I took menial jobs waitressing and babysitting, and did whatever I could to survive. I would go to the theatre. To me it’s like working out and you need to keep working out.”
She was quickly spotted in a theatre school play by a casting director and signed a five-year contract with Otto Preminger. Though her pre-SATC career is often written-up as the time of locusts and honey, this writer, for one, spent many formative years watching Ms Cattrall essaying romantic heroines. She was the kinky gym teacher in Porky’s, the teasingly strict cadet in Police Academy and the Egyptian princess cursed to assume the form of a 20th century department store dummy in Mannequin.
“I came to Hollywood specifically to get my green card,” she says. “But I did not stay long. I got movies all over the place. I’d go from Toronto and London To New York. I was always on the go. I was paying my rent to tour with plays, but I had fun. Those were fun roles.”
She has never disappeared from cinema screens completely. She played the Vulcan lieutenant Valeris in Star Trek IV; The Undiscovered Country, Tom Hanks’ wife in Bonfire Of The Vanities and even during the SATC years she could be seen essaying Britney’s mother in Crossroads.
At 19 she married Canadian writer Larry Davis; then German architect Andreas Lyson in the eighties and finally Mark Levinson. She is rumoured to have dated former Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau, Bruce Willis and fellow former Star Fleet graduate Alexander Siddig. She claims, however, to have been single for most of her life and has no children.
As fans of SATC’s more memorable scenes can testify, she exercises rigorously. She reportedly eats organic salmon three times each day as a ‘natural facelift’ remedy. The woman is a dynamo.
“I’ve always been very driven, very focused on my goals,” she explains. “I don’t have a philosophy but I am turning a big number in my life and it is kind of nice, Right now, I am a family person. They are my priority. When I was in my 20 or 30 doing the show was my priority. But I’ve always felt women give themselves a hard time about wanting things. I say screw it. Go for the job you want. Do what you want to do. Stick up for yourself.”
Her feisty approach would mesh perfectly with that of Samantha Jones, the mature arch-minx of the SATC crew. The role made her a household name and granted access to the best dress-up box of all time, though as long ago as season two there was evidence to suggest that wearing Manolos Blahniks all day wasn’t as much fun as it looked. One story claims that the other women ostracised Kim when, during a script meeting, she accidentally let slip that Cynthia Nixon had suffered a miscarriage. It was noted at that time that she was no longer permitted to sit with her co-stars at the Emmy Awards. Further reports suggested that while Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristen Davis and Cynthia Nixon were off enjoying sunny holidays together, Ms Cattrall was out in the cold.
There were rumours about the disparity in wages. Kim, as the only cast member willing to get her kit off and perform contortionist tricks with much younger men, was demanding wages equal to her less daring co-stars. Whatever the reason, SATC wrapped in 2004 with no prospect of a long-promised movie spin-off. And if things were strained toward the end, Ms Cattrall isn’t one to tell tales.
“I can only think back on it as a great opportunity,” she says. “I think when I look at that character, what I walk away with is how courageous she was. I honestly think she changed everybody’s idea of what it is like to be single. I was scared when I read it first. In fact, I turned it down three times because I was worried it would make single women look crazy. Do you remember that statistic from a few years ago – if you are single in your 40s you have a better chance of getting killed in a terrorist attack than of getting married. I felt that too, I don’t know if you could be perceived as sexy at that age. But huge strides have been taken. A woman can be a sex symbol in her 40s.”
She laughs.
“And I’m hoping in her 50s.”
Since bidding adieu to Samantha, Kim has appeared in indie comedy The Ice Princess, been courted by Desperate Housewives to play Nicolette Sheridan’s wilder sister and has appeared in London’s West End as a dying paraplegic in Whose Life Is It Anyway?
Currently, fans can get their fix with The Tiger’s Tail, a contemporary Irish satire from august director John Boorman. With a nod to Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected, this black comedy follows a successful property mogul (essayed with reliable aplomb by Brendan Gleeson) who encounters his considerably less affluent double while stuck in traffic. Shot through with Freud’s notions about the uncanny, the film sees the usurper take on the business, the money and marital duties with Ms Cattrall while our protagonist watches helplessly from the sidelines.
“I was sent the script by my agent and I read John Boorman’s name,” recalls Kim. “And I am such a huge fan - Point Blank, Deliverance, you name it. I read the first four pages and told my agent I wanted to do it. I thought the writing was so good. John had seen me in a play in London. He had never seen Sex And The City. He just took me as an actress that would be good for the role. We met when I was doing a book tour in London and had lunch and talked about it and had a really good rapport, I was so excited to get onboard because everyone who has worked with him had terrific things to say.”
Did he live up to his reputation?
“Oh yes,” she says. “It was a dream experience. It was my first time to Ireland. After I came home from set the first night, I couldn’t sleep I was so excited. The way everyone was talking about the film was incredible. And because you’re working with Brendan and Briain playing father and son, it really did feel like I was part of the family.”
Does her character know that she’s between the sheets with an identical bit of rough rather than her husband?
“Well, this is the question,” she says “We wanted to make that ambiguous. We wanted to see how far we could get away with it. I think we did. A woman can have a secret like that. The Mona Lisa has to smiling like that for a reason.”
As if on cue, onscreen beau Brendan Gleeson bounds around the corner to where we are sitting in the Clarence Hotel. Kim jumps up to hug him and nearly lifts him off the ground. It may not be the most elegant or restrained thing I’ve seen her do today, but it’s unquestionably the classiest.
You go girl, as they say.