Kim Victoria Cattrall is an English-Canadian actress. She is known for her role as Samantha
Jones in the HBO romantic comedy series Sex and the City, for which she won a Golden Globe
Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2003. Cattrall made her film debut by appearing
in Otto Preminger's 1975 film Rosebud. Films she has since starred in include Porky's,
Police Academy, Big Trouble in Little China, Mannequin, Masquerade, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered
Country, Sex and the City: The Movie and Sex and the City 2. For her role in the TV series
of Sex and the City, she received five Emmy Award nominations, four Golden Globe Award
nominations and won two ensemble Screen Actors Guild Awards, shared with her co-stars Sarah
Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis.
Having made her Broadway debut in 1986 in Wild Honey, she returned in 2011 to star in
a revival of Private Lives. Her other stage roles include Cleopatra in Antony & Cleopatra
at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2010 and Alexandra Del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old
Vic, London in 2013. In 2005, TV Guide ranked Cattrall number eight
on its "50 Sexiest Stars of All Time" list.
Early life Cattrall was born in Mossley Hill, Liverpool,
Lancashire. Her mother, Gladys Shane, was a secretary, and her father, Dennis Cattrall,
was a construction engineer. When she was three months old, her family emigrated to
the Canadian city of Courtenay in British Columbia. At 11 she returned to England when
her grandmother became ill. She took a number of acting examinations with the London Academy
of Music and Dramatic Art, before returning to Canada at age 16 to finish high school.
Career Cattrall began her career after graduating
from high school in 1972, when she left Canada for New York City. There, she attended the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and upon her graduation signed a five-year film deal
with director Otto Preminger. She made her film debut in Preminger's Rosebud in 1975.
A year later Universal Studios bought out that contract and Cattrall became one of the
last participants in the contract player system of Universal before the system ended in 1980.
The Universal system's representative in New York, Eleanor Kilgallen, cast Cattrall in
numerous TV guest-star roles. One of the first jobs Kilgallen got her was in a 1977 episode
of Quincy, M.E. starring Jack Klugman, whom Kilgallen also represented.
In 1978, Cattrall played the female lead in a two-hour episode of Columbo and also in
Blindfold, one episode of the 1970s TV series Starsky and Hutch in which Starsky is grief-stricken
since he accidentally blinded young artist Emily Harrison -her role- by a shot of his
gun. She starred in The Bastard and The Rebels, two television mini-series based on the John
Jakes novels of the same nmes. In 1979 she played the role of Dr. Gabrielle White in
The Incredible Hulk and would go down in TV Hulk lore as one of the few characters who
knew David Banner was alive and was the creature. Her work in television paid off and she quickly
made the transition to cinema. She starred opposite Jack Lemmon in his Oscar-nominated
film Tribute in 1980, and in Crossbar, the film about a high jumper who loses his leg
and still participates in the Olympic trials, with Cattrall's help. The following year,
she starred in the critically acclaimed Ticket to Heaven.
In 1982 Cattrall played P.E. teacher Miss Honeywell in Porky's, followed two years later
by a role in the original Police Academy. In 1985 she starred in three films: Turk 182,
City Limits and Hold-Up, the last with French star Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1986, she played
Kurt Russell's brainy flame in the action film Big Trouble in Little China. In 1987,
her lead role in Mannequin proved a huge success with audiences. One of her best-known film
roles is that of Lieutenant Valeris in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country; Cattrall
assisted in developing the character by designing her own hairstyle and even helped come up
with the name. Near the end of filming, Cattrall had a photographer shoot a roll of film on
the Enterprise bridge set, in which she wore nothing but her Vulcan ears. After finding
out about the unauthorised photo session, Leonard Nimoy had the film destroyed.
Aside from her film work, Cattrall is also a stage actress, with performances in Arthur
Miller's A View from the Bridge and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and Wild Honey to
her credit. In 1997, she was cast in Sex and the City, Darren Star's series which was broadcast
on HBO. As Samantha Jones, Cattrall gained international recognition. She capitalised
on her success by appearing in steamy television commercials promoting Pepsi One. She also
signed a publishing deal to write a book about sex with her third husband, Mark Levinson.
In addition, she can be heard reading the poetry of Rupert Brooke on the CD Red Rose
Music SACD Sampler Volume One. Her film work continued during Sex and the
City when she appeared in the film, Crossroads. Sex and the City ended as a weekly series
in spring 2004 with 10.6 million viewers. Cattrall reprised the role of Samantha Jones
in the Sex and the City film, released on 30 May 2008. She also appeared in the sequel
released in May 2010. She was nominated for 5 Emmy Awards for her role in the show.
In 2005, she appeared in the Disney film Ice Princess, in which she played ice skating
coach Tina Harwood of the film's lead character. She portrayed Claire, a paralysed woman who
wants to die, in the West End drama revival of Whose Life Is It Anyway?. In October 2006,
she appeared in a West End production of David Mamet's The Cryptogram at the Donmar Warehouse
in London. Since late 2005, she has appeared in a number of British television commercials
for Tetley Tea. In July 2006, a commercial for Nissan cars, which featured Cattrall as
Samantha Jones, was withdrawn from New Zealand television, apparently because of complaints
about its innuendo. In 2006, she starred alongside Brendan Gleeson in John Boorman's 2006 film
The Tiger's Tail, a black comedy that focuses on the impact of the Celtic Tiger economy
on Irish people. On ITV, she starred alongside David Haig, Daniel Radcliffe and Carey Mulligan
in My Boy Jack, the story of author Rudyard Kipling's search for his son lost in the First
World War. In early 2009, Kim Cattrall played Amelia
Bly in Roman Polanski's well received The Ghost Writer, which was released in 2010.
On 16 June 2009, it was announced that Cattrall would receive a star on Canada's Walk of Fame
in Toronto. The induction ceremony was held on 12 September 2009. In November 2009 whilst
filming Sex and the City 2 in Marrakech, Morocco, she took part in a seminar, 'Being directed'
with Director John Boorman as part of the 3rd Edition of the Arts in Marrakech Festival.
On 24 February 2010, Cattrall began a critically acclaimed run in the West End of London at
the Vaudeville Theatre as leading lady, Amanda, opposite Matthew Macfadyen, almost twenty
years her junior, in a revival of Noël Coward's play Private Lives. She performed until 3
May 2010. In the same year Cattrall starred as Gloria Scabius in the critically acclaimed
Channel 4 adaptation of William Boyd's Novel Any Human Heart.
Cattrall played Cleopatra in a production of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Janet
Suzman, opposite Jeffery Kissoon as Anthony, in Liverpool at the Playhouse in October 2010,
with a subsequent revival at Chichester Festival Theatre in September 2012.
In 2010, Cattrall was named an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University in recognition
of her contributions to the dramatic arts. In 2011, Cattrall reprised her role as Amanda
in a production of Noël Coward's Private Lives opposite Canadian actor Paul Gross in
Toronto, Canada and on Broadway. That year, Cattrall also appeared in "Uptown Downstairs
Abbey", the Comic Relief parody of the critically acclaimed historical television dramas Downton
Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. Playing Lady Grantham, she starred alongside Jennifer Saunders,
Joanna Lumley, Victoria Wood, Harry Enfield, Patrick Barlow, Dale Winton, Olivia Colman,
Tim Vine, Simon Callow, Michael Gambon and Harry Hill.
From June to August 2013, Cattrall is scheduled to star in the Old Vic's production of Tennessee
Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by Olivier Award-winner Marianne Elliott.
Personal life
Cattrall has been married three times. Her 1977 to 1979 marriage to Larry Davis was annulled.
Her second marriage was from 1982 to 1989 to Andre J. Lyson; with whom she lived in
Frankfurt and learned to speak German fluently, but admits she has forgotten a lot over the
years. From 1998 to 2004 she was married to audio
designer and jazz bassist, Mark Levinson. The two co-wrote the 2002 book Satisfaction:
The Art of the Female Orgasm. Cattrall also has been linked with former
Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, actor Daniel Benzali, musician Gerald Casale
of the new wave group Devo, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, and her
Whose Life Is It Anyway? co-star, Alexander Siddig. She currently lives in New York and
in an East Hampton, New York, waterfront home. In 2007, Cattrall revealed that in December
1988 she had been booked on Pan Am Flight 103, the aeroplane which crashed in Lockerbie,
Scotland, after a terrorist bomb was detonated during the flight. She cancelled her booking
on the flight at the last minute to complete some Christmas shopping in London.
She holds dual British and Canadian citizenship. In a 2011 interview on the Canadian radio
show Q, Cattrall stated that reports that she became a U.S. citizen in 2008 are incorrect.
In a 2010 interview with British journalist Sophy Grimshaw, Cattrall also stated: "It’s
been falsely reported on the net many times that I became an American citizen, which I
have not. I love America, I love New York, but I will never give up who I am. I’m not
an American." In August 2009, Cattrall took part in the
BBC One documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, where she discovered some uncomfortable
facts about her grandfather, George Baugh. Baugh, who disappeared in 1938, having abandoned
his family – including Cattrall's then 8-year-old mother and two younger sisters – turned
out to have bigamously married his new wife, Isabella Oliver, the following year in Tudhoe,
County Durham, and subsequently had another four children. She was told that in 1961 he
emigrated to Australia, where he became a postmaster, retiring in 1972 and dying in
Sydney in 1974. Cattrall's mother and aunts had known nothing of their father's life after
he left until they heard what the "Who Do You Think You Are?" researchers had discovered,
nor had the family previously seen a clear photograph of him. An edited version of the
episode was later shown as a part of the U.S. series of the same name.
Cattrall is an avid supporter of Liverpool F.C.
Filmography Awards and nominations
References
External links Kim Cattrall at the Internet Movie Database
Kim Cattrall at the Internet Broadway Database Kim Cattrall at the TCM Movie Database
Kim Cattrall at AllMovie Kim Cattrall at BFI Film & TV Database
Kim Cattrall at Emmys.com