carrie on acting

She's on her third film since Sex and the City ended, but Sarah Jessica Parker can't shake Carrie Bradshaw. Not that she's complaining, she tells Louise East.

Most actors want to let us know they are different from their screen personas. How often do we read of a star turning up to an interview with her face scrubbed clean of make-up and her hair scraped back in a ponytail? Ordinariness can be a badge of honour for people who know, deep down, that their lives are anything but ordinary.

Not for Sarah Jessica Parker, though. When she sashays into a suite at Claridge's, the upmarket London hotel, she is dressed in a shocking-pink silk dress with a scoop neck and a skirt decorated with black graffiti-like scribbles. Her shoes are teetering, lace-covered beauties by Christian Louboutin and her hair is in blow-dried spirals. The look is topped off with an extraordinary piece of costume jewellery that resembles a baby-pink, jewel-bedecked corn on the cob.

She looks great, she looks sexy and, above all, she looks like her Sex and the City alter ego. Carrie Bradshaw might have worn Manolo Blahniks rather than Louboutins, but the crazy rhinestone brooch? That's pure Carrie. So what are we to make of this peacockery? It would be easy to apply a trowelful of pop psychology and read it as Parker clinging to the role that made her famous, were it not for the three films she has made since Sex and the City wound up, in 2004.

In fact, talking to Parker, you quickly realise she is a smart cookie. Zooey Deschanel, Parker's co-star in her latest film, Failure to Launch, said, "She's got that old-school actress thing, like Katharine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert," and despite her perky, contemporary image, there is something of the 1950s movie star about Parker.

When she arrives late for our meeting - not her fault; it is sandwiched between a photo shoot and a press conference - she apologises profusely, then launches into a story about a journalist who detained her earlier. In the flesh, her features are too pronounced to be truly beautiful, but she is a compelling presence for someone whose red-soled stilettos don't quite touch the floor when she is sitting in an armchair.

All at once, she holds up a hand and gasps in mock horror: "What am I talking about? You don't want to hear about your enemies! Your arch-rivals! And I don't want to know about them. I want to know about you." It's a Lucille Ball comedy routine, a perfectly judged piece of professional charm that works because she seems genuine. Fans are always treated courteously. Engagements are kept. Behind closed doors, she insists, she's as much a slob as anyone, but if she has a professional engagement, then she gives the public what they want - and right now the public still want Carrie Bradshaw.

"In America the show is currently being broadcast on three different stations every single night, so there's a whole new audience," says Parker. "Strangely, it's taken some getting used to. They're younger, so they're very . . ." She pauses and pulls a wry face. "Demonstrative."

It's hard to think of another television series that captured the zeitgeist quite as Sex and the City did between 1998 and 2004. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha might have had better clothes, better cocktails and better working hours than we did, but we could still see ourselves and our friendships in these four working women as they flung themselves in and out of relationships, moral dilemmas and taxis, in an orgy of introspection.

Although it became fashionable to carp at the show's raunchy, hard-boiled one-liners and its obsession with shoes and handbags - like couture fashion, the story went, this version of femininity was created entirely by gay men - the show also entered the language ("That is so Sex and the City"), released an acidic wash of cosmopolitans across the western world and spawned a craze for pastiche questions of the kind Carrie poses during every show: "So I ask myself, in a city of 10 million souls, should a girl just settle for having her Blahniks fixed or is resoled undersold?"

What made the mix even more intoxicating was that Parker appeared to be Carrie. Like her character, she lived in Greenwich Village, wore crazy outfits and, in her fellow actor Matthew Broderick, had a charismatic boyfriend. Sure, their relationship was nothing like Carrie's disastrous affair with Mr Big - Parker and Broderick married in 1997 and now have a son to carry on the Parker tradition of having two Christian names: three-and-a-half-year-old James Wilke - but it was easy enough to blur the lines.

"People feel very comfortable about approaching me, and I was always very happy to speak to people," Parker shrugs. "For the most part, everybody is really friendly. People don't say mean things . . ." She pauses. "Generally." The decision to end the show in 2004 was mainly Parker's, and she confesses to missing the show more than she expected. "It's not so much the characters as shooting in New York with 180 people I know really, really well. I miss feeling safe all the time." Yet she still feels she did the right thing. "I probably could have stayed for another four or five years, but I recognised that's probably the very reason that I shouldn't. I knew there was a momentum going which meant that, if I made the difficult decision to end the show, I might have opportunities which were hard for me but good to try."

Still, Parker continues to be hailed for a part she wound up two years ago. Is she aware of the long shadow cast by Carrie Bradshaw? "Yeah, I think people still think of me as Carrie, and they may for the rest of my life," she says calmly. "You know, I haven't even had to make peace with that. I don't feel burdened by it. I think, if I were feeling professionally defined by it, if I was only reading scripts that were mediocre versions of the show, then I would start to resent it. But because I've been able to do these three very different movies back to back, and have been learning a lot about acting, I think I'm able to feel very comfortable with the association while also being able to experience what it's like to be a working actor."

Some might quibble with her description of the three films as very different. The Family Stone, which came out last Christmas, and Failure to Launch are both light and breezy rom-coms. In the latter, Parker plays a woman whose profession is to inspire men who still live at home with their parents to move out of the nest. When she meets Matthew McConaughey's insufferable Tripp, she falls for him - falls for Tripp, geddit? - and complications ensue.

Although her character is less introspective than Carrie Bradshaw and less of a control freak than Meredith in The Family Stone, in neither role is Parker called on to advance too far from the adjectives "ditzy", "lovable" and "well groomed". But although these roles may not have been startling, they were certainly canny in terms of Parker's career. Critics failed to love either film, but The Family Stone earned Parker a Golden Globe nomination, and Failure to Launch shot to the top of the US box-office charts, taking €20 million in its first weekend.

Her next project, Spinning into Butter, is a different proposition. Based on a controversial play by Rebecca Gilman, it's a low-budget independent production that Parker felt so strongly about that she came on board as producer. "It's a teeny, tiny movie about a racial incident at a small New England liberal-arts college. I play the dean of students. It's a story about who we really are and who we think we are. I just liked the idea of this conversation, because, as far along as we think we've moved, there's still this great divide in our country. We've seen it in recent events such as Hurricane Katrina, which was like a microscope turned on the haves and have-nots in this country and how colour-divided we really are." The difference between the haves and the have-nots is something Parker knows all about. Born in Ohio, the middle child in a family of eight, her mother and stepfather struggled to pay the bills, and when Sarah Jessica got her first television role, at the age of eight, the biggest excitement was the $500, or €400, it brought in.

After playing Annie on Broadway, Parker managed the tricky transition from child to adult actor with well-received roles in Footloose, LA Story, Honeymoon in Vegas and Ed Wood. When she was offered a television series based on Candace Bushnell's book Sex and the City, in 1997, she initially turned it down, as she was worried about being tied into a television series. Only after consulting Broderick, who once rejected Michael J Fox's role in the hit series Family Ties, did she accept the part, which eventually earned her a reported €165,000 an episode.

Yet Parker's adulthood hasn't all been sweetness and light. Before embarking on her apparently rock-solid marriage she dated John F Kennedy jnr, Nicolas Cage and, notoriously, Robert Downey jnr. The pair met on the film Firstborn and lived together from 1984 until 1991, when his problems with drugs made the relationship untenable. "It was like a leak in a poorly made pipe," she has said of him. "You're constantly putting tape on it, and tape over tape, and the tape gets weak and starts to buckle, and you can't stop the leaking. You keep doing that because you don't have the skills to mend the whole pipe, so you do what you can."

Her current in-laws, the Brodericks, are fourth-generation Irish-Americans who have owned a family home in Co Donegal since the early 1970s. Broderick has had some tough times there - two people died after he drove on the wrong side of a road in the county, in 1987; he was fined €127 for careless driving - but he and Parker visit Donegal regularly, most recently in August of last year, and own a "tiny wee cottage" just up the hill from his parents' house.

Parker is clearly committed to her role as wife and mother; her first criterion on taking a role is whether it will fit in with their schedule. "So far it's worked very well, in that Matthew has done a play [ most recently Mel Brooks's The Producers, on Broadway] when I'm doing a movie and a movie when I'm not working, so one of us is always at home with our son. I think if both of us were working in theatre it would be real hardship for James Wilke. I'm there to put him to bed easily five nights out of seven. It's a really important time for me and for him. When he's older I'll be able to explain that maybe I'm a better mother for working, but right now James Wilke doesn't want some strange obtuse conversation. He just wants me there, and I'm really happy to oblige."

Although it might sound as if Parker is painting a Disney version of family life, she is realistic about the possible pitfalls of a show-business marriage in which one partner's star may rise while the other's plummets.

"We're so suited to each other in so many other ways that we'll have to weather those things, and if there's any substance to us we will. For most working couples there are disappointments and there are great victories. It's up to both parties to celebrate the good and feel the bad. That's what it takes to make a marriage work, and it's very hard.

"That's why I think it's too bad when I see people bale out sooner, because, as hard as it is, it only gets better. The deeper you get into feeling someone else's pain, or getting through being furious with them, the better off the marriage is. It's tough and it's challenging, but that's the beauty of being an adult."

Last year the world's most famous thirtysomething turned 40 (and, as it happens, she's 41 today). She celebrated her new decade at a surprise party thrown by Broderick, but is still mulling over its implications. "You know, it came and went, and I was immersed in the day-to-day of work and being a mother. And then, about six months later, it really hit me. I suddenly understood all these conversations older women had always had about what it means to be 40 and all the good that comes with it. Now I feel like a convert.

"You'll never hear me say 40 is the new 20. Twenty-year-olds don't think that. But there's a lot I'm really happy for, things I know now about myself and about people I love and my child, that I simply would not have known 10 years ago. But, you know, there are some real physical changes. Like running in heels. I did that for seven years, and I can still do it, but I wake up in the night with some crazy pain in my tendon, and I'm like, What's happening?" She rolls her eyes, mocking herself Bradshaw-style. "That's nature telling you you're not 22 any more."

Failure to Launch opens on Friday