Role Model

On September 12, alongside fellow Canadian icons of the screen, stage and page, Kim Cattrall was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in a glittery gala ceremony at The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in downtown Toronto.

She was informed of her induction the old-fashioned way, the really old-fashioned way — through a letter in the mail, which to Cattrall, lent the occasion a sense of ceremony. “Me, like everybody else, mostly it’s e-mail, text, sometimes a phone call, so to receive it by mail was… it felt very real,” says the actress, over the phone from New York, a few weeks before the ceremony.

Because, like many of her fellow 2009 inductees such as Howie Mandel and DSquared2, Cattrall, 53, is at a high point in her career — juggling as many (if not more) carefully chosen stage and screen roles as ever — she didn’t have much time to celebrate the news. She called her family who was “absolutely thrilled” and was soon jetting off to shoot Roman Polanski’s British political movie, The Ghost, in Europe.

Academy Award-winning director, Polanski hasn’t made a contemporary film in twenty years, and this one, a slick thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, Ewan McGregor, Cattrall and awards-season favourite Tom Wilkinson, looks poised for both critical and commercial success when it opens (likely at the Berlin International Film Festival in February).

It was a good summer for Cattrall, who also began shooting Sex and the City 2, the sure-to-be-smash-hit sequel to the HBO series’ first film incarnation that premiered in May, 2008.

It’s SATC’s Samantha Jones who made Kim Cattrall a household name and an inspiration for powerful, sexually liberated and marriage-indifferent women everywhere who are tired of society’s archaic gender stereotypes. Yes, Samantha had more men through her bedroom over the show’s six-season run than Carrie Bradshaw had Manolo Blahniks in her closet, but she was never the show’s tramp. Instead, the 40-something blonde bombshell that gave us such lines as “I’m a trisexual, I’ll try anything once,” and multiple other side-splitters that cannot be repeated in this magazine, was the epitome of self-confidence, a female trait sorely lacking in the male-dependent, body-conscious female prototypes we see too often on the big and small screens.

“It really felt like we were sort of rebels almost, we were making these films that were purely Canadian based on Canadian books and stories and experiences.”

“She wasn’t a traditional 40-year-old and she’s certainly not a traditional 50-year-old. She doesn’t look at [age] as a barrier, she sees it as an opportunity, and I think there’s something to be said for that,” says Cattrall of Samantha. “This sort of appetite for life and experience is really what inspires a lot of women.” Cattrall’s generation, she says, is “astronomically different in every single way” than the one before. “Playing a powerful woman and being a powerful woman just creates so many more possibilities… When my mom turned 40 she was considered an old maid, when I turned 40 I felt like I was just getting started.”

It’s a role that overshadows a life’s worth of diverse theatre, film and television roles (Cattrall was in her forties with a long resumé when the series began), but she only speaks of the character fondly. “Samantha was one of the greatest delights in every possible way and [influenced] women to be more independent and strong and fearless and I love that about the character… but I also felt and feel that it’s really great to play other roles as well and work with different given circumstances other than what this delightful character has given me for almost 10 years of my life now.”