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SEXUAL HEALING

The end of a marriage, a TV series and a character that seduced the world. What’s next for Kim Cattrall?

Text: SIMON HOUPT

1 | 2 | 3 | FEB

Even a woman synonymous with sex and the city can tire of both from time to time. So here’s Kim Cattrall, known across the globe for her sexual stampedes around the isle of Manhattan, curled up alone by the sea on a drizzly fall Sunday.

One hundred and fifty kilometres and a universe away from her familiar flashy urban stage, she sips peppermint tea and gathers strength in a cozy cottage on the outskirts of East Hampton, not far from the house where Jackson Pollock painted and drank and raged away the last 10 years of his life.

This is where America’s royalty play away their summers in a Fitzgeraldian bacchanal, but in the off-season, when the parties have ended and the cameras have fled, nature’s regenerative rhythms reassert themselves. Here, backstage in the life of Kim Cattrall, she’s in an off-season of her own.

In this one-room office near the main house, framed artworks lean against the wall, yet to be hung. Everything is in upheaval: At age 47, her third marriage is over; she’s sold her apartment and shed her possessions. Most significantly, after six seasons as the woman who put the sex in the groundbreaking cable series Sex and the City, Kim Cattrall is preparing to let go of her most lasting creation, the delicious Samantha Jones, when production on the final season wraps up soon.

"I can’t even think about it right now. It’s just going to be really sad," she murmurs, cuddling her cat, Kobi, and casting a weary look out at the rain. The world is in shades of grey today: the sky, the sea and even Cattrall’s wardrobe, which consists of a tattered grey sweater and worn painter pants. Her streaked blond hair is weekend shaggy, endearingly mussed. With no makeup, her face seems almost girlish, softer than her onscreen persona. She is playfully contemplative, with an easygoing giggle.

Cattrall speaks of saying goodbye to Samantha, but not to sex. Even as she girds herself to film some emotionally devastating scenes for the show later this week, she’s about to jet off to Chicago for a guest spot on a makeover episode of Oprah about "the inner sexpot." There, while a housewife from Colorado performs a meek pole dance, Cattrall will gamely bump ’n’ grind for suburbanites across the continent. This is what it means to be a brand: In the public eye, Kim Cattrall equals Samantha Jones, and Samantha Jones equals sexual liberation circa 2004. She is the face of do-me feminism.

Two minutes after sitting down with a perfect stranger, Cattrall is already talking sex, unprompted. "People are very curious about themselves emotionally and spiritually and physically, but sexually they’re not as comfortable," she offers while drying off the cat, who is now purring with contentment. Kobi knows they’re kindred spirits.

For anyone who knew Cattrall when she was growing up in Little River on Vancouver Island after her family emigrated from Liverpool, it is probably a hoot to see how the actress has morphed into the world’s favourite feline. She was a tomboy back then, a toughie, and a little bit chubby. Even now, talking about how she feels knowing that millions have seen her topless, she has some residual British-Canadian reserve.

"They’ve seen Samantha naked; they haven’t seen me naked," Cattrall responds after a considered pause. "Physically, the body looks very similar, but the spirit is different. I’m coming from a different place." That place istotal commitment to the role, which stems from her background in theatre.

When Cattrall began acting, she submerged herself and her natural beauty into roles with terrifying commitment. Hollywood and the imperatives of stardom held such little allure that in the late 1970s, she almost chose a Feydeau farce at the National Arts Centre over a seven-year contract with Universal Studios. A friend suggested she might want to explore film work in L.A. before dedicating herself to the Canadian theatre scene.

Critical respect and box office success alternated in those early years, from her delicate role opposite Jack Lemmon in Tribute to her howling triumph as a horny gym teacher in Porky’s. Cattrall soldiered on, settling into B-grade anonymity in films like Mannequin, Star Trek VI and The Bonfire of the Vanities. But looking ahead, she realized Hollywood would grow less kind.

"I kind of felt, well, this is going to go down," Cattrall says, nodding at the memory. "I’m going to be [playing] the crazy aunt and then the suicidal maniac, and then I’ll have two lines in something, and I’ll be known as the theatre actress who does little cameos."

Then along came Sex, which changed everything.

1 | 2 | 3 | FEB