Sex haunts Sarah Jessica Parker — the on-screen kind, that is. She recently went to see a well-known actor backstage after a play. He declared: “I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.” This does not seem an unreasonable joke, but when she recounts it, she is in shock. She has never gone naked on screen, she insists. Yet so many think she has, even other actors. After all those goings-on as Carrie Bradshaw in the racy Sex and the City, she now fears her image is fixed, for ever, in the bedroom.
“I am regularly asked what I’ve done with all the sex toys,” says Parker, her cheeks turning a sudden and surprising red. “Yet my character never played with sex toys. All the others did — and took their clothes off, too. But not me.”
Is Parker now rewriting history on her highly successful show, which earned her fame and a considerable fortune? It’s not even as if she’s suffering now the series is finally over, as she is lined up for three big-budget movies. “People will believe what they think they saw,” she says. “I am just trying to put the record straight.”
What seems just a casual conversation about trivia suddenly develops into a full confession. The shoe-obsessed Parker — who, like her character, keeps a whole closet packed with the latest designer footwear — is really a goody two-Choos. She’s a shy woman who not only insisted on a no-nudity clause for Sex and the City, but questioned her character’s rather fruity language. As for all those cocktails with the girls, she has never been near a long slow screw in her life. “I just don’t drink: that is part of the problem,” she says. “I don’t really like the taste of it, and I don’t drink to relax.”
It has always been that way, apparently. “I remember finally being invited to a party when I was in my late teens,” she recalls. “I asked my father to drive me up the street to the party. Then I saw kids drinking beer outside. I asked him right away to turn around and take me home. I am old-fashioned in that way. I have never smoked anything other than cigarettes in my whole life — and have never taken drugs of any kind.”
Parker’s life remained a drug-free zone; she was not even an unwilling observer until quite recently. “I was stunned,” she says, as she recalls a cocaine-snorting incident when she was attending a party. “I thought I was in the film Scarface. I walked into the bathroom and there was a girl I knew well, with a rolled-up dollar bill, snorting cocaine. I was terrified the police would arrive at any moment. So I turned on my heel and left.” She’s not naming names, of course. But, given Parker’s attitude to sex, drugs and drink, why on earth did she sign up for Sex and the City in the first place? This brings another confession. The offer came out of the blue for a pilot — and she was horrified at the consequences. She, unlike the other stars of the show — Kim Cattrall (Samantha), Kristin Davis (Charlotte) and Cynthia Nixon (Miranda) — had built up a reasonably successful film career. It was kick-started by Steve Martin choosing her to play the Venice Beach babe in LA Story (1991). She appeared alongside Nicolas Cage in Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), played a 1950s starlet in Ed Wood (1994) and appeared in several 1996 movies, including The First Wives Club, Extreme Measures, Mars Attacks! and The Substance of Fire. The producers of Sex and the City, with its dodgy title and controversial content, wanted at least one respectable name.
“Once I had said yes, I went from uncertainty to terror,” she says. “I recognised that the script was well written and the character was interesting, but I was terrified that I would be shackled to that character. So, after we did the pilot, I completely panicked and thought, ‘What can I offer to get myself out of this?’ And people started coming up to me — strange people from film studios. They would say, ‘Hey, I saw your pilot.’ It would just make me cringe. I would grin at them, then call my agent to say, ‘I don’t care what it takes, or if it leaves me broke and on the street begging for cash, just get me out.’”
If all this makes Parker sound like another paid-up member of the oversubscribed Hollywood nutters’ club, then perhaps I should pause to say that she seems quite sensible. She has distinctive green-grey eyes, with hair curled and long, and is wearing an expensive-looking green top that shows off her bare, slim arms. Her words are chatty rather than dramatic. It’s just something she wants to get off her chest. “My agent talked me through my panic and arranged a meeting with a movie producer I really admired,” she says. “He sat me down and asked, ‘What scares you?’ I said, ‘I have this wonderful life in New York. I can work in theatre and movies, and have time to see my friends.’ So he said, ‘The worst thing that could happen, then, is that Sex and the City could be successful? If that’s the case, you cannot lose.’”
The advice worked like a homeopathic remedy. Parker was in a bang-to-rights winner, full of glamour, fabulous women and sex. Some of the most handsome men in Hollywood were flying back and forth to New York to appear in the series. “It was,” she agrees, “the happiest time of my life. Apart from my son being born (James, in October 2002) and my wedding day, it was the best.” The irony of her 1997 marriage to the actor Matthew Broderick, now 43, was its timing. Within weeks, she was returning to their apartment having spent most of the day in the arms of an on-screen lover. “There were so many,” she says, looking rather embarrassed at the thought. “Then I had to go home. So it was weird. Matthew seemed to be fine about it. There does not seem to be any post-traumatic stress, either.”
Parker should know all about stressful relationships, having lived with Robert Downey Jr for a time in the early 1990s. Her relationship with her husband, who stars in the film of the stage musical The Producers, to be released on Boxing Day, was a slow burn. It started with a mutual friendship through her brothers. So, was it love at first sight? “I can’t speak for him,” she responds. “I liked him straight away. He is a charming person and has a lot of qualities that I think are great. So I don’t know whether it was love at first sight, but I definitely wanted to spend some time with him.” That’s a no, then.
Parker has a similar pragmatic attitude towards Downey and other men from her past. “I have had great boyfriends, and they all seem well and happy in their lives now,” she says. “It does not cross over in my life that way. Those relationships are done, and they were great. I am probably better for having been in them. I feel it is like a succession of chapters in your life, which you close. It might sound old hat, but that’s true.”
There doesn’t seem to be anything old hat about Parker. Early this year, she added an Emmy award for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series to her best-actress Golden Globe from 2000. At 40, she is now able to concentrate on a movie career that has been in cold storage. The series has also paid off in that she seems to have graduated back into films at a much higher level than she was at when she left. Her big relaunch has been planned by one of the giants, Twentieth Century Fox, around the simultaneous US and UK release of a Christmas romantic comedy, The Family Stone. Parker is the lead in a high-profile ensemble that has Diane Keaton as her prospective mother-in-law, Dermot Mulroney as her fiancé and Claire Danes as her sensible sister.
Parker’s character is another New Yorker, Meredith Morton, who is sharp, successful and highly ambitious. Her fiancé, who seems swept up by her talk of targets and her nonstop work ethic, decides to introduce her to his family. On arrival, however, she is faced with a laid-back household in New England who prefer their bohemian lifestyle to big-city life. She is introduced to his wild hippie brother (Luke Wilson), a gay brother (Ty Giordano) and a beautiful, if troublesome, younger sister (Rachel McAdams) who takes an instant dislike to her. After that, Christmas becomes a battlefield.
It is a battle that any audience can see coming with the certainty of a 20-ton truck causing damage as it ploughs into a china shop. Yet, although the script is slushy, the film has heart. A series of preview screenings across America shows that there is a different and less cynical demand at Christmas. “I thought, right from the start, that it had enormous promise,” says Parker stoutly. “My character is difficult and rigid. I had to make her seem real, rather than a cliché of a driven and demanding woman. I am supposed to be a character actress, so my aim is to create someone who also has some warmth and vulnerability.”
Parker delivers big-time vulnerability in one particular scene, in which her character gets drunk in a small bar and decides to enjoy a solo dance. “That bar scene was the most embarrassing of my entire life,” she reports. “I don’t drink, so that was bad enough. But dance? I never dance in real life. I don’t go to clubs or dance at parties. So I found dancing around on my own was the most difficult scene I’ve done — and you can count every episode of Sex and the City and all my films in that.”
With remarks such as this, and recollections of her panic over Sex and the City, why did Parker want to act? She answers in typical guileless style: “For someone like myself, who was not academically inclined, it was a great escape.” She was born in small-town Nelsonville, Ohio, and brought up in Cincinnati. Her mother divorced her father, married again, and she now has seven sisters and brothers. “We were not particularly confident or ambitious in my family, but we were drawn towards the arts,” she says. “I didn’t go to college. I started working from the time I was quite young, and found a life. I never claimed to be great at what I do.”
She’s making a good job of it, though. She has launched her own company, Prettymatches Productions, marketed her own perfume, Lovely (“Musk and lavender, with some floral notes,” she says), and has two more big movies lined up for release after The Family Stone. First is Failure to Launch, another romantic comedy, with Matthew McConaughey. It is followed by the far grittier Spinning into Butter, co-starring Beau Bridges and Miranda Richardson, with Parker playing the dean of a college who has to deal with a race crime.
All this career activity has led to a speculative report in a New York newspaper suggesting that she could be the richest woman in the city.
“I think that is hilarious,” she snorts. “I don’t know whose bank accounts they were looking at. I’m flattered and insulted at the same time. But, financially, I cannot complain.”
She gives a shy smile. “I guess that sex pays.”
The Family Stone is released on December 16()
