She made her name as Carrie Bradshaw's friend Samantha, but Kim Cattrall isn't so brash. Just strong, writes Kate Holmquist
I am Kim Cattrall's Doppelgänger. We were born five months apart, and while I gave up a theatre career to be a journalist, mother of three and wife of twentysomething years, she gave up her desire to be a homemaker and career woman to be an actor, marry three times and have some impressive orgasms for all of us to see - in Sex and the City, anyway. Cattrall is the fantasy woman whom men born in the late 1950s are afraid of - which is, perhaps, why she prefers younger men - and whom women born in the late 1950s want to be: shameless, demanding and more beautiful with every passing year.
So, when we meet, I come right out with it: "I'm your Doppelgänger." And she laughs - a throaty, sexy, eye-crinkling laugh that says she knows exactly what I mean. Doesn't everybody fantasise about being somebody else? She's an actress, so she knows this. "Yeah," she says, rather generously. "I can sort of see it. Our hair's the same colour . . . But, you know, I've got a make-up artist and hair person making me like this."
She's almost apologetic about looking so well turned out, in a tailored cranberry-tweed dress that drapes open across her broad shoulders but hugs her athletic figure like a glove. As we talk, I get the feeling that this sexy image isn't really her. The Doppelgänger joke is appropriate because Cattrall is in Dublin to publicise a film about twins separated at birth, John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail. Cattrall plays Jane, a neglected Celtic Tiger wife whose husband, Liam, is a ruthless property developer in godless, greedy Ireland. Liam is driving to work one day when a homeless man who looks just like him peers through the rain-spattered window of his car. The bum turns out to be Liam's twin, whom he has never met. Through accidents of fate, the brothers switch lives, and Liam ends up living in a homeless shelter, where he learns how the other, propertyless half lives, while his homeless brother takes over his life and discovers that Liam is virtually insolvent.
Cattrall says she's long been an admirer of Boorman, ever since The Emerald Forest, in 1995, and was delighted to get the part. The film was well received at the San Sebastian film festival, but Cattrall's role was criticised by Variety, for what the magazine's reviewer called a "contrived rape-turned-delight scene", after "the impostor's usurpation of Liam's wife", that could make audiences lose sympathy for the "classy" actress. "That had to be written by a man," says Cattrall. A woman, actually, I tell her. She doesn't miss a beat. "Well . . . Isn't that what every woman wants? To be swept off her feet by her husband? At first she doesn't know he's her husband, but the character has been set up beforehand, so the audience knows she's not in danger. I don't know about you, but some of the best sex I ever had was after a fight."
Liam is played by Brendan Gleeson, who also made The General with Boorman. "Sexy!" Cattrall says. "Acting with him, you feel like you are in one of the great combinations: John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara or Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart."
But doesn't she get tired of being cast as the sexy, smouldering and funny woman, the Mae West character? Does she ever feel lessened by it? "I think it's more than okay to have a sense of being sexy and attractive. I have so many girlfriends who are unbelievably sexy and strong. Some men can take it and some men can't. The days of hiding it are over. There are all kinds of people out there, and there's enough to go around. There are enough roles to go around, enough love to go around, enough acceptance to go around. Enough of everything."
That's what a lot people find attractive about Cattrall: she knows she's powerful and doesn't feel she has to apologise for it - although she insists she isn't a sexaholic like Samantha from Sex and the City. Strange as it may sound, she resembles Samantha but doesn't look as much like her as I'd expected. Samantha's arrogant posture and smooth, unflappable expression - except when in the throes of an orgasm - are not apparent in Cattrall's proud but slightly self-effacing demeanour. Without professional lighting to turn her into someone else, Cattrall is a lot more attractive. "I'm not Samantha," she says, and that's true in the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs - no plastic surgery there - and in the unexpected softness in her face.
Since Sex and the City ended, with its main character, Carrie Bradshaw, going off with Mr Big, and the actress who played her, Sarah Jessica Parker, going off to make some so-so romantic comedies, Cattrall has returned to her first love: theatre. She says her happiest time was being 14 and hearing that, when she was 16, she would be going to study drama full time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in New York.
Born in Liverpool, she emigrated to Canada as a baby with her parents. In a photograph of her climbing a tree at the age of 14, her face is bold and open to experience. Her expression, framed by dark blond hair, is more knowing than most teenagers', but it is innocent, too. That determined young girl is the person Cattrall says she has always tried to remain, even though she was only 16 when she was swept off to New York to become a serious actress. Before she even graduated from the academy she was cast in Otto Preminger's 1975 film Rosebud, and she soon signed a deal with Universal. Her film work - in teenage films such as Porky's, Police Academy and Mannequin, was offset by stage work in Chekhov's Three Sisters and Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. "I've always been a working actress," she says, adding that she's so into working, rather than being famous, that she is still surprised when people recognise her on the street.
Currently, she's getting rave reviews in the West End of London, in a David Mamet play, The Cryptogram. "I play a woman who is June Cleaver in the beginning, then turns into Medea by the end," she says. (June Cleaver was the perfect home mother in the 1960s US TV series Leave It to Beaver.) Cattrall's parents, a construction worker and a housewife from Liverpool, wanted to live the American dream. "My mother wanted to be June Cleaver."
Cattrall says that her role in The Cryptogram, a play she sees as being about the complex and confused state of womanhood, is difficult and exhausting. "It's written in Mametese, for one thing; also, because the boy is played by three different young actors, aged nine, 11 and 13, each performance changes. But that's what's exciting about it." She also, she says, loves connecting with an audience of only 250 people.
The night before we meet she had people back to her place after the show, then had to get up at 6am to fly to Dublin. "I'm exhausted. Really, I just want to be home in my jammies," she says. As I'm your Doppelgänger, I suggest, how about if we change places: I'll go star in the West End while you go back to my place and cook dinner for my husband, who's on crutches, and my three children and three dogs? And Cattrall answers, not quite with a tear in her eye but sincerely: "That would be really, really nice."
Those three marriages, not to mention an early affair with Pierre Trudeau, the late former prime minister of Canada, and her relationship, last year, with a chef who was 20 years her junior, have taken their toll. Tell me about all that, I say.
She averts her eyes and looks at the floor. "It's called surviving life." So you're not gay? She laughs. "A tabloid journalist actually rang my mother and asked her that question, and Mother could only say: 'She's the most heterosexual woman that's ever existed.' Can you imagine? People have nothing better to do than wonder about things like that and ring my mother and ask her."
Cattrall's parents, who live in western Canada, are elderly now. Cattrall sees them once a year. This year she has rented a chalet, and they're going skiing together. Her father, who has early dementia, has never skied, so Cattrall has found a resort with a chair on skis, so that people who can't ski can experience the sensation. She's pleased about this, in the way that only a daughter who has her own life but wants to do something good for her father can be.
She's a bit of a mother hen. Her book Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life is about self-image and self-esteem, telling girls to be proud of who they are, whatever their shape. Written in a bright, snappy style, the book would be useful for any mother and daughter who need to talk about body image. She was inspired to write it partly by one of her closest childhood friends, a recovered anorexic who travels with her now and helps her cope with her schedule.
"That's the book I'm most proud of," Cattrall says. (She has also spent a few weeks as a New York Times bestselling author with Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, which she wrote with her then husband, Mark Levinson.) "There were all these girls coming into Manhattan. They'd seen Sex and the City, they were dressing like the characters, they were having Sex and the City days - and while it was flattering and all, that's not what the show is about. That's not what life is about."
When Cattrall tried to make a documentary series about body image for teenage girls, she was unable to get funding. "That was a big disappointment. The series was to be based on seven teenage girls, using their first-person experiences through each episode. Nobody was interested unless I put a heart throb in it," she says.
She proposed the project through Fertile Ground Productions, her Canadian company, which has already made a feature-length documentary, Sexual Intelligence, with an accompanying book. But it's teenage girls whom, because of media messages that everybody has to be perfect, she'd really like to reach. It's possible, though, that Cattrall is too strong a character in her sexuality for investors to see as a mentor for younger women. It's a shame, she says.
Before long, the PR person holds up three fingers, to tell us how many minutes we have left. We have been talking for 30 minutes, instead of the stipulated 15, so we have to stop. I go home to my husband and children, smiling at the thought of Cattrall turning up to cook their Sunday dinner. What Cattrall is thinking I don't know, although I suspect she can't get back to London, a warm bed and cosy jammies fast enough.
• The Tiger's Tail is released on November 10th. Being a Girl is published by Piccadilly Press, £12.99 in UK