However, she’d be the first to concede her latest career move couldn’t be further from the intricacies of Shakespeare.
From today she will be appearing in the new television campaign for the Nintendo Super Mario 3D Land game.
It seems an unlikely marriage but then it transpires that Kim is a gaming fan. “My first introduction to games was Brain Age which I loved and gave to everyone for Christmas. The Wii is really good fun and I do 30 minutes of yoga on it every day.”
Although Kim had played a series of high-profile roles before Samantha, starring in Police Academy and the romantic comedy Mannequin, it’s the legacy of Sex And The City that’s given her a weighty calling card. “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for playing Samantha,” she says.
“I loved her free spirit and joie de vivre. Here was a woman talking about what she wanted and what was good for her in a way that has always been thought of as a male point of view.” Securing other parts once the series finished was not as difficult as she’d feared because she chose to return to theatre. In 2010 she starred in London’s West End in Noël Coward’s Private Lives.
She is aware women over 50 are often marginalised in films. “You’re off the desirability list. There is a stigma attached because you’re not considered sexually viable, which is ridiculous.”
R idiculous indeed. Kim is a very attractive woman. So is she happy when she looks in the mirror? “Sometimes,” she says. “But sometimes I look really tired.” Would she succumb to having some work done?
“It’s a scary proposition, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’m not there yet. I look at people and I think: ‘She looks great, she’s probably had something done.’
“When you don’t know what that something is that’s the way to go, but then I see some people who look like an alien race and think: ‘Oh, who are you?’”
She admits to dieting, although remaining a healthy 9st 8lb. “My weight is my Stradivarius so I’ve got to be in tune with it.”
In 1998 she was diagnosed with the auto-immune thyroid disease Hashimoto’s. “I’d always had a lot of energy but it dropped and I knew that something was off and I had some hair loss. If your thyroid is out of whack you’re screwed as it’s your body’s thermometer and you can’t function. Now I’m on thyroxine and get my blood tested twice a year.”
While some women take offence at the mere mention of the dreaded menopause, Kim is dismissive of actresses who view it as a no-go topic. “It’s a part of life, why is it so taboo? I’m on low doses of HRT for periods of time.”
In theory, she has been married three times but doesn’t count her 1977 marriage to Larry Davis as “that marriage was annulled” and she doesn’t sound keen on getting spliced again. “I don’t see why I would,” she says dryly. “But you never know.”
Her second marriage was from 1982 to 1989 to Andre J Lyson and for six years from 1998 she was married to businesman Mark Levinson.
Like Samantha she is also partial to the younger man and was with restaurant chef Alan Wyse, who is 20 years her junior, for five years. That doesn’t mean she’s searching for a toy boy and is dating “quite a few” men at the moment.
“I had a great time with Alan but he was too many generations away,” she says. “I think maybe a 10-year gap is the most I’d want.”
Living alone can be tough but Kim’s not afraid of her own company.
“It’s okay to be lonely, I can pick up a phone. I have a great foundation of family and friends. Sometimes I think I would love to have some help but it’s okay. Life is not about being happy all the time. That drumbeat is exhausting; sometimes you need to feel sad.”
l Kim Cattrall stars in the new campaign for Super Mario 3D Land, available now exclusively on Nintendo 3DS
Interview by JANIE LAWRENCE
