“But before you know where you are, their ideas are so accepted people say they’re obvious.”. Kim Cattrall doesn’t want her photo taken. “That might make her sound like a prima donna,” says the PR nervously, “but she really isn’t. And she’s happy to talk about anything, but she won’t talk about her father. Have you got a press pack?” A plastic envelope is shoved into my hands. I’m then led into an overheated room, where Kim is sitting, with another PR.
I assume the latter is just about to leave, but she stays firmly rooted in her seat Oh joy
Kim Cattrall doesn’t want her photo taken. Oh joy.
It’s somehow fitting that Cattrall should be surrounded by such a posse, because, of course, Samantha Jones – the character she plays in Sex and the City – is a public-relations supremo. She makes her money by smoothing out rough edges, by showing things in their best possible light. And yet, ironically, audiences love her because this fortysomething blonde also tells it like it is, especially when it comes to sex. Which is precisely what Cattrall’s father, Dennis, objects to. As he told the British press last year, he thinks the mega-successful HBO show about four New York singletons makes his daughter look like a “slut”.It’s all so confusing.
When it comes to ladies who lust, does Sex and the City take us forwards, backwards or in circles? It’s the done thing to say that Samantha represents a new kind of woman, but surely Mae West and Jean Harlow got there first, draggin’ the crowds in with a mixture of wit and filth, till the strictures of the puritanical Hayes Code began to chafe. Since then, we’ve had the glorious Shelley Winters chasing toy-boys in Alfie, and Madonna chasing everything in Desperately Seeking Susan. Meanwhile, Ab Fab’s Patsy and This Life’s Anna prove that on TV, women who get the most men are virtually guaranteed to get the last laugh. Such characters and their fans don’t think “slut” is a dirty word. Dirty, if anything, has become the new clean.Cultural revolution or not, it almost passed Cattrall by. Born in Liverpool, and brought up in Vancouver, Canada, this veteran of crass’n'cheerful movies such as Porky’s and Police Academy turned down the role in Sex and the City several times. Initially, it was because she was engaged to the actor Daniel Benzali.
During her second marriage, to a German architect, she’d put off having children to concentrate on work. As she explained in 1997, she was going to reverse the trend: “Getting married and having a baby right now are more important to me than having my own sitcom.” As it turned out, she and Benzali split up; and Cattrall, now a three-time Emmy nominee, has been elevated to celebrity status.She’s seemed more than willing to cash in on such fame (she’s loyal to sponsors, and once did live TV interviews holding a Nikon digital camera, to the assembled journalists’ dismay). But if Cattrall is not averse to money, she has her own agenda, too. Last year, she wrote a bestselling book with her husband of four years, Mark Levinson, called Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm. In the forward, she talked about how her mother had experienced little in the way of sexual fulfilment.
