grab a seat, kim is dishing

Grab a seat, Kim is dishing

With Sex and the City now firmly in her past, Kim Cattrall opens up to Elizabeth Renzetti in London about her new Canadian boy toy, her upcoming documentary on the mysteries of sex, and why she skipped Sarah Jessica Parker's 40th. 'Believe me, I would not be at that birthday party'

By Elizabeth Renzetti

The Globe and Mail

Saturday, April 9, 2005

There is a bed in the corner of Kim Cattrall's dressing room, and looking at it, you think: How much would that fetch on eBay? That there is a bed should not come as a surprise. The surprise is that it is so small -- room for only one, surely, maybe two if they're good friends -- and so demure in its tightly folded pale covers.

Beds figure prominently in Cattrall's fictional lives: If this were the boudoir of Samantha Jones, the Venus flytrap she played on Sex and the City, there'd be a mirror over the bed and several exhausted men underneath it. When Cattrall leaves this dressing room at the Comedy Theatre in London's West End, she'll spend the next two and a quarter hours immobile in another bed, a hospital one this time, as the quadriplegic sculptor in Whose Life is it Anyway? Shortly, she will begin her preshow ritual, which involves relaxing to a meditation tape. A Jo Malone candle burns on her dressing table, next to some daffodils that have seen better days. "Usually I have fresh flowers," Cattrall says, crushing one of the blooms between her fingers.

Cattrall, who is 48, is a beautiful woman -- and none of your patronizing "for her age" or "at her stage in life," thanks very much. She has no makeup on, and looks a little exhausted. It is more tiring than you might think to move only your head for two hours a night, six nights a week, while the literalists in the audience gaze intently at your limbs to make sure they don't twitch.

And after four months of projecting to the back of the room from a hospital bed, only to be followed in her off-hours by London's tabloids bearing rumours of lesbian trysts and Sex and the City hair-pulling, she's entitled to want to curl up in that dressing-room bed for a week or two.

There isn't any rest in sight, however: After this production wraps at the end of April, she'll be concentrating on her new book and documentary, both called Sexual Intelligence, and embarking on a book for young women called Everything I Ever Learned About Being a Girl.

And despite the travails of being chased by motorcycle-riding paparazzi, the consolations of life in London have been abundant. Her performance has received excellent reviews, she feels a certain comfort being back in the land of her birth (she was born in Liverpool, moving to Vancouver Island as a child), and, oh yes, almost forgot -- there's a dishy 27-year-old Canadian boyfriend making gourmet meals back at her rented flat.

If we take ourselves out of the gutter for a moment, we find also a more exalted pleasure: She is helping introduce the pleasures of the theatre to a new generation whose live-performance experience might otherwise be limited to watching Britney Spears at Wembley.

"There have been a lot of young girls in the audience because of Sex and the City," she says. "I've had letters saying, 'I've come to London with my dad on business trips before but because you were in this play I wanted to see it, and now I want to see more theatre.' It's fantastic."

In Brian Clark's Whose Life is it Anyway?, Cattrall plays the paralyzed sculptor Claire Harrison, a role originally written for a man. ("That," she says dryly, "is probably why it's such a great part.") Claire is at the end of her tether, alternately rage-filled and bitterly funny. She wants to die, and no one will let her. Says director Peter Hall, "One of the great things about Kim is that she has a wonderful lack of sentimentality. She's a very precise and hard-edged actress. She's very touching in the part because she doesn't play for sympathy."

Hall, a legend of British theatre, met Cattrall when he was head of the National Theatre and directing a touring production of Wild Honey in New York in the 1980s. In it, Ian McKellen played opposite a young actress with whom Hall stayed in touch. They talked many times over the years about working together, but their schedules wouldn't co-operate. One day, as Sex and the City was ending, Hall sent Cattrall the play to read, and four days later she was on board.

"It is the most demanding acting job," he says, "because you're on the stage all the time and you can't move anything but your head." It's hard to be so still for so long, says Cattrall, and as she sits in her dressing room she seems already to be drawing her energy around like a blanket. She's casually dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, which is fine, because after watching Sex and the City for six years, I feel I know her private business better than her mother and her doctor combined.

She is, of course, an actress, and Samantha was an act. There's more housecat than panther to Cattrall; her voice is quiet and animated, not Samantha's whipped-cream purr. But, like Samantha, she has a refreshing tendency to call 'em as she sees 'em. She's not interested in blowing smoke up anyone's thong.

Take Sex and the City, for example. Samantha is a role she will forever be associated with, and while she's fine with that -- "She's very sexy, very sassy, very courageous" -- she is also happy that the series is over, the last cosmopolitan drained. All that's left now are the rumours, because there's nothing the world loves more than a good old catfight.

Last year there was much talk that Cattrall was the only member of the cast who didn't want to make a Sex and the City movie, largely because she felt she wasn't getting a fair deal. She does not refute that now. "If there is a movie, it will have to be a really good script, because there hasn't been a script, and also a very fair deal for everybody. Not just... -and here her eyebrow climbs as high as the Empire State Building- some people."

Speaking of "some people," what about the reports that there was a rapprochement between her and the other cast members at Sarah Jessica Parker's 40th birthday party in New York? "Believe me, I would not be at that birthday party." Well, this certainly calls for a bit more prodding.

"Look," Cattrall sighs, "we had our time together. And the real truth of it is that we weren't best friends. We were colleagues. We had a common ground and a common purpose."

She has moved on, to a life in the movies (with a part in the recent Disney feature Ice Princess) and theatre (there are talks about bringing Whose Life is it Anyway? to New York). Increasingly, her life is in books -- Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, written with now ex-husband Mark Levinson, was a bestseller -- and behind the camera. Her Toronto-based production company, Fertile Ground, is responsible for Sexual Intelligence, the documentary and accompanying book, which are due in the fall.

In the documentary, history and psychology combine to unlock some of the mysteries of sex -- if indeed there are any mysteries left. It does sound better when she says it, so imagine this in Kim Cattrall's voice: "We go through a history of how men and women deal with their sexuality, the men dealing with the phallus, the penis, and women with the vulva, the vagina. . . . We end up taking the soul and the body and bringing them together in the myth of Eros and Psyche."

So isn't there a danger, at this point, of becoming the Sex Lady? Of being stuck forever in the slot marked tart? After all, she does appear naked, albeit tastefully, on the cover of Sexual Intelligence. But Cattrall folds her arms and says mildly, "I don't feel typecast. I don't know -- is typecasting such a bad thing? To be typecast as a brave, smart, funny courageous, sexy woman? At any age, but especially now as I'm approaching my late forties?"

Certainly, the tabloids can't get out of her bedroom. While in London, she's been chased by paparazzi, read that her apartment was burgled while she was on stage (it wasn't), and, even worse, had to endure repeated stories about her alleged lesbian relationship with an old friend and assistant.

At one point, a London tabloid phoned her mother in Vancouver to ask if Cattrall had any Sapphic secrets. "And my mother said, 'What are you talking about? They're childhood friends!' It was absurd. If there's anybody in the world who's going to be upfront about their sexuality, it's going to be me."

In fact, she says with a sly smile, "It's quite nice having a Canadian boyfriend." That boyfriend is Alan Wyse, a chef she met while filming Ice Princess in Toronto. And while she's having a good time -- Wyse often stays with her in London -- she feels no need to set up with husband number four. "I don't see a need to be married. I don't want to have kids, and I don't feel any issues about owning someone or having to belong to someone in that way. I just got out of a marriage, and the thought of going back there is so inconceivable."

Earlier in our conversation, Cattrall had taken down from her bulletin board a photocopy of a mural she is having painted at her New York apartment. It's a charming, somewhat Victorian scene of dozens of monkeys, all different types, clambering over branches. She has a thing for monkeys, their brashness and sense of fun.

At the end of the month she'll be returning to New York, her home since she was 16, when she left Victoria to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Does it ever feel, as someone who has bounced around from country to country, that she has no real home? New York is her home, she says, but then she adds, "I'm not English. I'm not American. I'm Canadian."

-30-