On the TV series Sex and the City, character Samantha Jones’s core question is: “Can women have sex like men—no strings attached?”

Ooooh. It’s so heady. Can she? More importantly, would we?

The question is clearly compelling to “normal” women—beyond the few who dole out hand jobs to passing acquaintances—given the more than 10 million viewers who tuned into HBO for the series finale in 2004. Not to mention the frenzied fan cacophony leading up to the release of the long-awaited Sex and the City: The Movie in Vancouver on May 30. But why the obsession? Really, how many of us are Dolce & Gabbanaing it up, teetering around on Manolo Blahniks, aging in a sparkling cloud of Botox and cosmopolitans?

When actor Kim Cattrall first read the book by Candace Bushnell on which the series is based, she didn’t identify with that world either. In fact, in a phone interview from New York City with the Georgia Straight, the B.C.–bred bombshell revealed that until she finished shooting the series, her world was far from glam.

“Most of my life, I’ve lived in sort of ”˜student-lite’, I call it,” said the actor who plays the vampy public-relations diva, “IKEA furniture and old trunks that I bought at garage sales when I was in my early 20s, not letting go of any of the furniture or belongings that have trailed me for the past 30 years. At the end of the series”¦I decided that I was going to get myself an apartment and I was just going to have some luxury in my life. I was going to do it right. I was going to wake up on any given morning and I was not going to look around me and think, ”˜Oh, my God, I gotta paint this place. I gotta get rid of those bookshelves; they’re falling down. I gotta get a new TV!’ I just got rid of everything and started again.”

It’s hard to imagine Cattrall, now a 51-year-old global sex symbol, living with water-stained posters from the 1970s (she threw them out in 2004). But this is her magic, and that of SATC. They’re both equal parts fantasy and reality.

Cattrall was born in northern England, near Liverpool, to a homemaker mother and builder father, and her family moved to the Vancouver Island town of Courtenay (current population 22,500) when she was an infant. It felt like growing up at summer camp, she recalled, “which I always found kind of glamorous”. She spent her early teens back in England, at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, before returning to B.C. for the end of high school. Her 20s coincided with the Los Angeles of the 1980s. For her, it was a decade of sex-kitten roles: heating up 1982’s Porky’s (the highest-grossing Canadian film for 24 years, until 2006’s Bon Cop, Bad Cop) as Miss Honeywell, a wide-eyed gym teacher turned on by the smell of sweat; playing sexy cadet Karen Thompson in the original Police Academy (1984); then, in Mannequin (1987), acting the role of a hot clothes dummy that comes to life. She has married and divorced three times, authored two books, lent her face to Tetley Tea, and filled Mary Tyler Moore’s Broadway shoes when she played a quadriplegic woman in Peter Hall’s Whose Life Is it Anyway? in London’s West End, among a dizzying CV of other tasks.

The real Cattrall is like the series: a heightened version of reality.

Why is any of this important? It’s too easy to write off Sex and the City as a vacuous-consumerist guilty pleasure and Cattrall as an icon crowned by a culture obsessed with TV and fashion, not to mention sex. For most of us, her luxe Carole Lombard–inspired art deco apartment will forever remain untouchable. The show’s New York City aesthetic of designer boutiques and pearl thongs is as far away from the streetscape of 41st Avenue and Knight Street as is Jupiter.

But Cattrall notes that beyond the couture accoutrements, the heart of SATC is real. And that’s what keeps us “normal” viewers staring gape-mouthed at Samantha, Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, and Charlotte York.

“I don’t think anyone has given voice to it,” Cattrall said, generally speaking, of 21st-century women’s reality on the screen. “I remember one of the scenes when Miranda says, ”˜I can’t stand myself. I haven’t showered in three days and I smell like baby vomit,’ and I think that a lot of moms can relate to moments like that. Or a Samantha moment of looking at herself in the mirror and saying, ”˜My God, my neck is saggy.’”¦I think you see those challenges in these characters. I mean, we’re wearing lipstick and we have our hair blown out, but I think that those [human] things are in the story lines.”

It’s true—and even more so in the movie, a two-hour-and-28-minute gauntlet of chillingly familiar foibles that let the characters, on our behalf, wrestle with love, sex, kids, fat, friendship, humiliation, and forgiveness. In grisly detail, SATC: The Movie zooms in on the crossroads of third-wave feminism, where tradition and opportunity have collided. Marriage, for example, is both crushed and lauded, from every possible angle.

In both the TV series and the movie, Carrie’s newspaper-column questions scratch the surface of that third wave: “Are relationships the new religion?” “How do you know if you’re good in bed?” “Are men just women with balls?”

However, any woman watching the show, if she has a brain, is echoing with her own, more contemplative, questions: “How far have we come?”,“Is independence a curse?”, “Now that we have a room of our own, are we squandering our freedom, wealth, education, work opportunities, birth control, and free time?”

In other words, are we fucking it all up? Or is the plush, single Manhattan of 1998 to 2008 the pinnacle of feminine achievement?

God, it’s just so important. And Cattrall is the queen, playing the most extreme of the four characters, personifying the ultimate in potential female freedom for the past decade, which is why this movie is so consequential. What will become of Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte?

The real question is, in the absence of their leadership, what will happen to us, the “normal” women?

The 2004 series finale was criticized for its abrupt reversal of the show’s quirky independence by ending with four happy, monogamous couples. In the movie, do the women continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible or will they all cozy up to a big circa 1955 celebration of traditionalism? And is that so bad?

Cattrall, however, reminded the Straight that SATC has contributed far more over 10 years than can be encompassed in a movie finale. Her role, she recounted, was a public reimagining of mature sexuality.

“I’d just turned 41 [when offered the part], and I didn’t feel I was sexy enough to play this,” she recalled. “I thought that my salad days were behind me. And you know, the revelation was it was just the beginning. In a professional way but also a personal way, it was just an awakening.”

Her trio of books likely cashed in on her sexually savvy SATC character: Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm (coauthored in 2002 with her then-husband Mark Levinson); Kim Cattrall: Sexual Intelligence, the book and HBO documentary (2005, also available on DVD); and for a different audience, Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life (2006).

Cattrall, however, distanced her career from B.C.’s other over-40 bombshell, Pamela Anderson (the two grew up 120 kilometres and 11 years apart). The two blonds are probably the province’s most famous actors—a funny tidbit in a land rich in Mirandas and Carries and short on Samanthas, generally.

“I think Pamela is a real celebrity,” Cattrall said of Anderson. “I think of myself as an actress. I play a lot of different kinds of roles. I think Pamela [has] built a very strong career of being a certain way and looking a certain way, and I don’t think that’s what I’m about. My career is about different kinds of characters.”¦I never aspired to be a sex symbol. I think Samantha is the sex symbol. I think I look good; I feel good. But I”˜ve never really felt like I’ve wanted to create a persona outside of the work that I did.”

Cattrall said she is disgusted by the attention paid to the celebrity world. As she did publicity for Sex and the City: The Movie, Tom Cruise was due to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. On a news show she watched, that “story” ran just after a report from Iraq. She said she’s uncomfortable with the line between news and gossip being blurred.

“ ”˜If it bleeds, it leads’ is no longer the top story. Now, if it’s celebrity, it leads.”¦People can’t get enough of it. And it’s really perpetuated by gossip mongers. We [the four SATC leads] went to an event another night and we were sitting at different tables, and they were like, ”˜Meow! Spat!’ [referring to an alleged schism between Cattrall and the other three actors], and I thought, ”˜You’ve got to be kidding. This is ridiculous.’ Is there not enough going on in the world where idle minds need to stir these things up?”

Allegedly, Sex and the City: The Movie was delayed due to Cattrall’s tensions with other members of the cast. Sarah Jessica Parker, who became an executive producer of the TV series while it was showing on HBO, is rumoured to have denied Cattrall a bigger paycheque. Cattrall, however, shrugged off the idea that personal problems plagued the set, saying instead that she has a professional relationship with all of the actors. Though she thinks the “gossip mongers” should give it a rest, she said she’s still interested in celebrity trivia such as who is wearing which shoes, because “there’s a difference between being a girl [and appreciating designers] and just insanity.”

On June 9, Cattrall’s own celebrity profile will be boosted when she receives the NBC Universal Award of Distinction at the Banff World Television Festival. After that, she’ll fly to Vancouver for two weeks to visit her family. Her sister resides in Burnaby, and her father, who she said is living with dementia, is in a care home in Coquitlam. The rest of her family still lives on Vancouver Island. She plans to rent a car and take the ferry to visit them.

“I think it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth,” she said of B.C. “Hollywood glamour? Maybe not. But I don’t consider myself in that realm.”¦What I love about Canadians is they’re very much like the Brits; they don’t take things at face value, and they like to make fun of themselves. There’s less of an earnestness about them, and I enjoy that.”

She should know, having dated Canada’s most infamous bachelor: then–prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

“We met at the opening of a film I did with Jack Lemmon called Tribute,” she recalled. It was 1980, and they were together for about one year. She was 24, he 60. “We started to talk, and he asked for my phone number.”¦I was working in L.A. at the time, and I came home from my sublet and there was a phone message from the office in Ottawa. I played it to all my friends, all my family. It was a pinch-me moment. It was a Valentine experience.”

Uh, so what was the PM like as a boyfriend?

“Oh, he was just a renaissance man. Incredibly bright and attentive and charming, and very, very kind. Very approachable. Very contemplative.”¦He had flair.”

Clearly, so does she.

Can women have sex like men? Perhaps. Cattrall spent six years on TV asking that question. Now, with the film complete, it’s up to the rest of us to come up with our own answers. And continue asking new questions.