The last time I met Kim Cattrall, she introduced me to the first man who had
given her an orgasm. There was an uneasy silence in the drawing room of a
rented Regency terraced house in London, as I shook hands with Mark
Levinson, her third husband.
“It has nothing to do with size or being able to do it five times a night,”
said Cattrall. “It’s just a matter of knowing what a woman wants and needs.
I’d been searching for good sex, but always ended up having to take care of
myself. I presumed that would always be the case.”
But Levinson, an audio-equipment designer and part-time musician, 10 years her
senior, is no longer getting her to dance to his tune. He has been consigned
to the scrapheap of Cattrall’s long and varied love life and the latest of
her men to learn, perhaps, that even good sex isn’t enough.
This is a woman who has put her career first and does not mind admitting it.
She’s been in some lousy movies and TV series, worked for tyrants, travelled
anywhere, any time, wrecked her marriages, and avoided having children.
“I’ve been in love for most of my life,” she says, “but that love has been for
my work.”
Cattrall can view great wealth, high fashion and much younger women from her
apartment in the heart of Manhattan, New York, near which we now speak in a
hotel suite. Is anyone, she asks, having as good a time as her? She has a
brand-new Mercedes 4WD parked outside, in which she is about to travel to
her beach house on Long Island.
She’s enjoying fame and fortune with a bank account that is bulging. And she’s
having the best sex in the city.
Hold on. Isn’t this familiar? Cattrall, 51, reports the fact without
embarrassment. Her young lover, the Canadian chef Alan Wyse, 29, is not only
a master in the kitchen, where he apparently can rustle up something
delicious before you can say cordon bleu, but he’s also hot stuff in the
bedroom. He’s already on his way from Toronto to join her for the weekend.
He has, she says with a knowing smile, read her book, Satisfaction: The Art of
the Female Orgasm, which she wrote in 2002 with Levinson. And he seems to
have memorised all the right chapters. She insists: “It is also a proper
relationship, with a grown-up man, who isn’t afraid to show his feelings.”
Cattrall, never prissy or shy, seems assured and confident in talking, because
this relationship has, so far, lasted three years. “I thought it might last
three weeks,” she says. “You can report all this how you like, but please
don’t call him a ‘toy boy’. He’s no boy. He’s probably the most mature man I
have met. He’s also of a different generation in that his mom always worked.
So he accepts that I have a job and another life, which is what older men
find so hard to deal with.”
Such conversation could come straight from the script of Sex and the City. Her
character, the man-hungry public-relations whizz, Samantha Jones, had a
young boyfriend, Jerry “Smith” Jerrod (played by 36-year-old Jason Lewis).
It seems ironic and, somehow, fitting that she’s landed an even younger man
off screen and is living the good life in Manhattan.
This diet of great food and sex seems to be working. Cattrall can easily pass
for 10 years younger and everything about her looks vibrant. Flushed, even.
She has genuine sex appeal, which seems to desert most top actresses once
the cameras stop rolling. She wears a designer white dress to appear like a
glamour-blonde movie star of old, from soft shoulders to thighs that show
off her shape. “I am no size zero or super-thin Hollywood actress,” she
says. “I am built for men who like women to look like women.”
She was last seen enjoying sex olympics with the athletic “Smith”, as HBO
killed off Sex and the City in 2004. She’s now back, in a film version,
which promises more of the same, even though the script has been kept under
wraps. Lewis, as “Smith”, is back in action and Mr Big (Chris Noth)
re-emerges to bring confusion to the life of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica
Parker).
But Cattrall’s own life went into a tailspin when the TV series finished. For
a woman whose identity is clearly driven by her career, it came as too much
of a culture shock to be faced with a diary that was suddenly empty. “My job
came to an end, and it was awful to say goodbye to such a great character,”
she says.
“As far as I was concerned, I was sacked. It was the end.” That end also came
at a price for her relationship with her husband and co-author, Levinson. “I
had dedicated myself to the show, doing countless 17-hour days, and I had
detached myself from him,” she explains.
“When I wasn’t working, I’d be travelling around the country, promoting the
show. I’d be getting home at 2am, or getting up at 3.45am to get the first
flight out to somewhere. That puts stress on a marriage, so I can’t pretend
our divorce was amicable. It was tough and nasty.”
There was more bad news. Her father, Dennis, who had emigrated to Canada with
her mother, Shane, from Liverpool, when Cattrall was just four months old,
was diagnosed with dementia. He was living alone, having divorced years ago.
“I look at that time as a blur,” she says. “It was devastating and difficult
to spend time with someone and think of how they used to be and what
struggles they now had on a daily basis. I’d been enjoying my work with Sex
and the City, then, suddenly, everything was going wrong.”
Cattrall, though, is not a natural-born Scouser for nothing. She’s a scrapper,
prepared to try anything. Her answer was to move to London to play a
paralysed woman in Peter Hall’s West End production of Whose Life Is It
Anyway?.
“It could not have been a more different character from Samantha,” she says.
“It also meant I was back in the place I still consider home, which is
England.”
This is no hollow actor-speak. Despite those glam looks, Cattrall does not do
sycophancy. Even as a child, she had patriotic fervour. She returned to
Liverpool with her mother as an 11-year-old, initially to spend time with
her great-grandmother. But she begged to stay behind when her mother went
back to Canada.
“She let me stay for about a year,” she says. “It was when I discovered how
much I loved acting that I saw my first play, The Importance of Being
Earnest, in London, and my first Shakespeare, which was As You Like It,
starring Janet Suzman. I was devastated to eventually have to return to
Canada. I remember praying every night that something would happen that
would allow me to go back and live in England.”
But she did not stay long in their tiny adopted town of Little River,
Vancouver Island. She went to drama school in New York at 16.
“I left home then and have never been back to live,” she says. “My family were
always very supportive, not in a phoney way, but in a Liverpool way. In
other words, they would never tell you to your face.”
She launched her career on New York’s lowly-paid lunchtime theatre scene, and
waited tables in the evening to make up the money.
“I was slinging hash, as they call waiting in New York. I also did babysitting
and typing. I felt both independent and resourceful.”
These qualities helped her on arrival in Hollywood, where, as a razor-keen
18-year-old, she was signed on a long-term contract by the producer-director
Otto Preminger. “It was an archaic system,” she says. “You were, basically,
under the control of one man and his whims. He wasn’t easy and it wasn’t an
easy time. He wasn’t a nurturing director and I thought, ‘Maybe I don’t want
to be a film actor, after all.’ ”
Her debut film, Rosebud, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Attenborough, came out
in 1975. It is the first of a thick wad of movie credits, most of which I’ve
never seen or heard of. (“I’d never want to watch some of them myself,” she
says.)
Her contract with Preminger was bought out by Universal and she then started a
run of appearing in single episodes of virtually every long-running TV
series from the 1970s: Starsky & Hutch, The Incredible Hulk, Charlie’s Angels.
“I realised that, in Hollywood, you can’t really depend on anyone,”
she says. “You have to fight for everything you get.”
Such single-mindedness towards her career has not made her the easiest of
wives. She married, at 19, another Canadian unknown, Larry Davis. It lasted
a year. She gave it another shot, in the 1980s, with André J Lyson. Was sex
really a problem – or did she just say that for the benefit of her book
sales?
“When I finally expressed my sexual frustrations to girlfriends, to my
amazement many of them were going through the same problems,” she replies.
“You just can’t tell, because it’s not widely discussed. It takes a lot of
courage to admit, even to yourself, that you’re not getting satisfaction
from your husband or boyfriend.”
The memory brings us back to Sex and the City and her boyfriend, Alan Wyse.
“I’m always learning,” she says, with a shrug. “Good sex has to be combined
with a relationship of equals.”
It was not love at first sight. She had been working on a film in Toronto and
met Wyse in a successful restaurant, where he was second in command. “There
was instant chemistry. I thought he was attractive, had a shy confidence and
a sense of humour. He asked for my mobile number and said, ‘Let’s hang out
together.’ I thought, ‘I’m in town for six weeks, I’m not in a relationship,
and he’s a lovely man. Why not?’ ”
She was also aware of the age difference (“I’m old enough to be his mother”)
and anticipated that the relationship might be short-lived. The fact that it
still seems to be going strong has come as something of a surprise. “We
spend time together at my place in New York, or at his in Toronto,” she
says. “It’s always a good feeling.”
She’s pragmatic about their future. “It won’t end in marriage,” she says. “I
accept I’m the type of woman who’s always married too much to her work. It
doesn’t keep me warm at night, that’s for sure, but I so love what I do. I
can’t remember a time, from the age of 10, when I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’d love
to see this film or that play.’ I’ve a passion for working and, equally, for
being an audience member if the film or play is a good one.”
Cattrall does not seem the easiest of women to live with. “No, I suppose I’m
not. There’s always somewhere to go and something to do.”
Even her boyfriend, Wyse, was surprised when she accepted £300 a week to
appear at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in 2006, in David Mamet’s play The
Cryptogram. She also played the mother of Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) in
the first-world-war drama My Boy Jack.
“The money from the Sex and the City film allows me to try other things,” she
says. But she insists the series itself did not bring the sort of huge
payout that went to the stars of other US series, like Friends or Frasier.
“We were on cable and were never paid that kind of money, but I do have
financial security, thanks to the film.”
She’s not spelling out the figures, but a cool £2m, plus profit share, has
been mentioned.
“It had to be enough to get us all together again,” she says. “It did
take four years, so there was some hard negotiation.”
And in those years, she did not see any of the three other actresses, Parker,
Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, adding fuel to rumours that they never
really hit it off. So what really went on? There’s no doubt that money was
an issue. Parker, the one star out of the four who was tempted into TV from
a reasonably successful film career, was far better paid. And Cattrall said
the moment the series was over there would be no movie, unless there was a
big payday.
“I wanted us all to have a piece of something,” she said at the time. “It
would be a shame not to reward the actors who had so much to do with shaping
the show.” (That’s actor-speak for meaning herself, of course.)
Davis broke ranks and spoke of her disappointment. Meanwhile, Parker insisted:
“There’s no bitterness towards Kim.” Again, that was taken
at the time – rightly or wrongly – to mean there was bitterness aplenty. A
year later, Nixon, who seemed to be “resting” (ie, unemployed)
acidly joked: “I have nothing to do, thanks to Kim.”
There then began complex discussions with separate agents and business
managers of each of the actresses. As anyone who has experience with
Hollywood-style negotiations will report, this is the equivalent of trying
to turn Beverly Hills into a cocaine-free zone. The director, Michael
Patrick King, declared: “It would be amazing if we actually got this thing
moving.”
But, amazingly, it has become reality. And Cattrall, while denying a fallout
among the four women, is not flagging up their friendship: “It’s no use
saying we’re best friends – because we’re not. And most of my work has been
outside New York, so I haven’t been around. They’d have had to travel to see
me and nobody did. But it felt like no time had passed when we met up again,
even though everyone seemed nerve-racked.”
For all her on-screen sexiness and off-screen relationships, Cattrall would be
as excited to wake up with a good script as with the man of her dreams.
“There’s no better feeling than when you know that you’re going to be on stage
each night, trying to make the part better and different for an audience,”
she says. “That’s just the way I am. I don’t think I’m going to
change now.”
Sex and the City is released on May 28
