Smash hit

So much did viewers take to heart Carrie Bradshaw’s pearls of wisdom, generated while writing her weekly Sex and the City column for the New York Star, that “complete strangers in search of advice took to telling me their most intimate problems,” Sarah Jessica Parker recalls. “And, you know, I’m not the sort of person who talks about those kinds of things. But I suppose that was just an indication of the power of the show.”

Other signs that this was no ordinary TV show? The way that Carrie’s penchant for shoes made “Manolos” and “Choos” household names. Parker’s own outfits, meanwhile, “papped” on the streets of Manhattan and featured in magazines such as heat and Hello!, made the actress a fashion influence in her own right. All of that and the worldwide phenomenon of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte lookalikes.

“I see four women walking down the street together and I recognise something in their behaviour,” Parker explains. “And I know we had something to do with that, for better or worse. Sometimes it’s a woman showing a thong and I think, ‘Well, that’s the bad part of our legacy.’” And the good part? “Friendship. The sex toys and the candid talk and the salty stuff is funny, but it’s cotton candy. And if it was only that, I don’t think the show would have lasted because, like cotton candy, it’s just empty calories. I think it’s the journey of these women that people connected to.”

Parker, 43, is still a fashion barometer – dressed today in grey Versace and Halston jacket and clutching a Prada bag (“And you’ll need to know the shoes, too, right? They’re Brian Atwood [a cult American designer]”). But, if anything, her life now with husband Matthew Broderick and their five-year-old son, James, is even less like Carrie’s. She still lives in New York, but: “You know, the portrait the show painted of the city was hyper-real, idyllic, with a kind of poetry and all of this amazing potential for romance, set to the backdrop of fantastic architecture and literature. But, real or not, I think that was very exciting for women.”

SAMANTHA

When Kim Cattrall was first offered the part of Samantha Jones, she turned it down. “I’d just turned 40 and I didn’t know if I could play such a sexually crazed woman,” she recalls. Yet Sex and the City without Cattrall would be well, like sex and no city – or vice versa. But she had a serious point: in 1997, there really wasn’t a character like Samantha on our screens, and it seemed a huge professional risk to play her.

“Back then – which is not that many years ago, actually – people really did believe that women in their forties weren’t very sexy, and that women in their twenties and thirties were perfect because they were young and desirable.”

But Cattrall, now 51, overcame her fears and went on to embrace the role. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Why am I fighting this?’ It’s kind of fabulous, and such fun. And soon I started to really enjoy it. The show was watched by just about everybody and it was so revered by our peers that those six years ended up being a tremendously exciting time. I have absolutely no regrets.”

And what’s more, Cattrall says playing Samantha was instrumental in changing the way she approached her own life. “What I’m now discovering – and I’ve since entered another decade – is that, the older I get, the more self-knowledge I have, which makes me feel even more sexy.”

Indeed, Cattrall seems to have taken Samantha’s liberated attitudes to heart, writing a book with her then husband, Mark Levinson (they are now separated), called Satisfaction: The Art of Female Orgasm, and then dating a number of younger men – her current boyfriend is Canadian chef Alan Wyse, more than two decades her junior.

She certainly exudes a sexy self-confidence. Dressed in a Michael Kors floral-print dress, her blonde hair is teased into perfection. But, for a woman in her fifties – albeit a self-assured, attractive one – the film and some of the more raunchy scenes must surely have been daunting. “Listen,” she explains, “the producers have nothing invested in me getting up there and looking less than my best.”

She feels that the film, like the show, will push the envelope, especially in the way society regards the sexuality of a middle-aged woman. “Attitudes to age are still a huge issue in our world. And that’s why I am so happy to be of a certain age playing a woman of a certain age. We changed the way people thought about 40 – maybe we’ll do the same for 50 and even 60.”

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