Kim Cattrall: ‘With Samantha, 40 became sexy. Let’s have more of that’
The Sex and the City star on surviving grief, falling in love again and her new podcast Central Intelligence.
Kim Cattrall is recounting a recent – and highly relatable – interaction in the gym of her Manhattan apartment building where “one of the members of the board was playing really loud, obnoxious music”, she says. “The man is, I would say, in his 70s.”
Cattrall asked him to turn it down or use a pair of headphones, “and he got incredibly offended”. After explaining that it wasn’t really her request, but a building rule governing all residents, “he said, ‘I want to talk to your husband’,” Cattrall recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t have a husband’. He said: ‘And you wonder why?’
“I wrote an eloquent letter to the board,” she continues, with a tiny smile. “He’s no longer on the board. The fight continues, and it’s the little victories.”
One does wonder where such a man might have been for the past quarter-century. For millions of the rest of us, the formidable Cattrall will forever be frozen in televisual time as a feminist icon: the unapologetic, sexually voracious and unmarried fortysomething New York publicist Samantha Jones, whom she played in Sex and the City from 1998 to 2004, as well as in a couple of (well-paid but rather less well-received) films in 2008 and 2010. That Cattrall is now in her “late 60s” (she turns 69 in August) feels like a bombshell, albeit one she delivers breezily.
“I’m in this sort of category now of the wise older woman,” she says, putting on a pair of enormous but glamorous red spectacles. “Which makes me laugh because nobody knows anything.”
We’ve met in person twice before: once in 2012 for lobster rolls and beers at a roadside seafood shack close to her holiday home in the Hamptons – when, somewhat improbably, she arrived with REM frontman Michael Stipe in tow – and again for smoked salmon and scrambled eggs in the summer of 2016 in the demure dining room of an Upper East Side hotel. Today, we had planned to meet at a London hotel, but plans changed, so we’re speaking by video call – me from my basement flat in Brighton; Cattrall sitting beneath a vast oil painting in her Manhattan apartment.
We’re discussing the second series of Central Intelligence, a retelling of the founding of the CIA in which Cattrall stars alongside Ed Harris and Johnny Flynn. “In this age that we’re living in right now, ‘central intelligence’ seems like a contradiction in terms,” Cattrall says archly. She plays the series narrator and real-life CIA agent Eloise Page, who began her career as a secretary to the chief of the Office of Strategic Services (the espionage service that preceded the CIA) during World War II, became the agency’s first female station chief and its highest-ranking female officer in Athens in 1978, and later became a consultant on terrorism to the Defence Intelligence Agency.
Only after saying yes to the role did Cattrall, who has spoken openly about her decision to remain child-free, discover that Page also “didn’t have children, she was never married, her job was her life … And I think she was completely fulfilled and happy,” Cattrall says. “That made her even more of a hero for me – in those times, especially.”
It may seem a little incongruous to find an actor who is synonymous with New York on a singularly British radio station, but the Liverpool-born, Canada-raised Cattrall has a strong affinity for the BBC. “When I first moved to New York, I didn’t have a television, but I had a radio and a cassette player and I would listen to radio dramas in the dark,” she says. She is a longtime fan of The Archers, and it was during a brief stint at Radio 4 almost a decade ago that she met her partner, Russell Thomas.
In September 2015 she had been a guest editor on Woman’s Hour, on which she talked about being a woman of almost 60, single and without children. Several months later, after a bout of crippling insomnia – during which she managed as little as three hours’ sleep a night – she was forced to pull out of a play, Linda, at the Royal Court Theatre in London owing to sleep deprivation.
“Part of it was related to menopause and stress, and just not taking any time out,” she says, as well as grief after the death of her father from Alzheimer’s in 2012. “I just hit a wall.” Back in New York, she underwent cognitive behavioural therapy to relearn how to sleep. “And I kept a diary, which I have off and on in my life, but for this it was more contemplative – ‘this is how I’m feeling today, and this is what was difficult, and this is what was easier’.”
In April 2016 Cattrall went back to Woman’s Hour, recording a 45-minute reading of her diary entries for a special edition of the program. In the process she met Thomas, 14 years her junior, who was working for the BBC at the time – although not, as has been erroneously reported, as a sound engineer.
“He was an actor originally. He’s had an incredibly interesting life and really done it on his terms. He’s a bit of a rebel, which I love,” she says. They kept in touch, and he flew to Canada to visit her. “We’ve been together almost 10 years now,” she says, lighting up like one of the Christmas trees the couple make annual “crazy” videos of for social media. “And we’ve had a blast. We’ve just had so much fun.”
It is certainly a far lighter Cattrall today than the one I last saw in May 2016, fresh off the back of that Woman’s Hour recording and still carrying the burden of loss.
“What I felt in spades was how alone I was,” she told me then. “The questions that I was having in the small hours were: Do I deserve what I have? Why don’t I deserve other things? Am I not worthy? Why am I alone? Will I be alone?”
There was more grief to come too. In 2018 her brother, Christopher, died by suicide, aged just 55. “I think when someone dies from suicide, those around them think, ‘Why didn’t I see it? Why wasn’t I there?’. Or, ‘How could I have been ignoring, in retrospect, signs that were clearly unhealthy?’. But that was ultimately his choice,” she says, visibly emotional. “I had to accept that I couldn’t change that destiny. That as much as I thought I could, and as powerful as I thought I was, I couldn’t have prevented it.
“I keep saying I wish I hadn’t gone through all that. And then I thought to myself, well, if I hadn’t have gone through that, I wouldn’t have met Russ.
“So life has surprises and trade-offs. It was a bad time, but I learned a tremendous amount. And at the other end of it was this incredible, fun playmate.”
Cattrall was just three months old when her parents emigrated from Liverpool to Canada in search of work. In the early days, money was so tight the family would drive across the country in one car, towing another behind to sleep in. Her father, a British army officer turned construction worker, bought the foundations of a house on Vancouver Island for $50, then built the rest of it himself.
“There were artists, but no actors, and few regional theatres,” Cattrall says of growing up there. “It was very provincial.”
She moved to New York City aged just 16, which was, she says, “like landing in my kind of Disneyland. Everything was accessible all the time. And the theatre that I saw and the people that I met – it was like going to Rome”.
After graduating from acting school Cattrall was signed up by film director Otto Preminger – whom she has described as “a horrible, horrible man” for his intimidation of young female actors – as one of the last starlets of the studio system, making her debut in Rosebud in 1975.
She had roles in 1980s classics such as Porky’s, Police Academy and Big Trouble in Little China, and the lead role in cult comedy Mannequin, as well as a part in Star Trek IV:
The Undiscovered Country in 1991. She kept working in her first love, theatre, playing Masha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and the title role in Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
I’ve been told Cattrall won’t be discussing the show that catapulted her to bona fide stardom today, but when the subject of Sex and the City comes up, she talks with warmth and fondness about it.
“I created a fantastic character that I loved, and I put a lot of love in it,” she says. “And if I’m remembered only for that, then that’s really OK.”
Cattrall turned down the role four times before accepting it; she was 41 and did not believe audiences would see a woman of that age as sexy. “Self-inflicted ageism,” she says, laughing. “Well, that changed – 40 became sexy. It became, ‘Man, let’s have more of that’.
“She wasn’t a nymphomaniac – well, some people might have thought she was – but she was just enjoying the main course. Everyone else was nibbling on the appetisers when she was going for the steak. And it was always on her terms – that I always insisted on.
“But,” she continues. “I’m the antithesis of her (Samantha) in many ways. I’m a serial monogamist, and then some.”
Aged just 19, Cattrall married Canadian writer Larry Davis, but the marriage was annulled after two years. In her 20s she married German architect Andreas Lyson, which lasted seven years, and in 1998, in her early 40s, she married musician Mark Levinson. In 2002 the couple wrote a book together, Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, but two years later they separated, with Cattrall reportedly claiming that his sexual demands had become burdensome.
In the years after Sex and the City Cattrall has kept working in film, including the title role in Meet Monica Velour and with Ewan McGregor in The Ghost Writer (both in 2010). She also spent more time on stage in the UK, opposite Matthew Macfadyen in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in the West End of London; playing Cleopatra in Anthony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse, and; starring in the Old Vic’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth.
“One of the things that was so attractive about coming to work in the UK was that they saw an actor. In America, they saw her,” she says, meaning Samantha. “And in America I was perceived as a woman of a certain age, whereas in England I was perceived (simply) as a woman.”
Today, she and Thomas divide their time between New York, Vancouver Island and the UK. “I don’t need to be on a soundstage,” she says. “I don’t need to be on a stage. I’ve done it and I’ve so enjoyed it. And if it comes again, it will be for good reason. Because I want to try something different.”
Cattrall is optimistic about the new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney – “Look at the wealth of experience he has, that he brings as a statesman to the table. It’s a good moment; I think it’ll be OK” – and supportive of Keir Starmer – “who’s turning things around” – but she can only vote where she pays taxes: the US.
“We have not known something like this time in our lives,” she reflects on the Trump administration. “Our parents did. But we didn’t. And we were sheltered from it. And I think for a lot of us who felt surprised, it was a real wake-up call. Saying to yourself, ‘wow, I guess I live in a smaller bubble than I’d ever imagined’.
“But we have to say: ‘Wake up! There’s still time’.”
The Times
Central Intelligence series one and two are available on streaming platforms.
More Coverage
Add your comment to this story
Sexual violence was rife on October 7, say new witnesses
Testimony from survivors and 15 hostages shows rape was used as a weapon of war, but most victims were ‘permanently silenced’ – either murdered during the assaults, or left too traumatised to talk.
Plant-based foods pass acid test for health and waistlines
Participants in a new study on lowering ‘dietary acidity’ lost almost 6kg in weight.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout