Interview: Kim Cattrall, actress

I'M supposed to meet Kim Cattrall in the lounge of Edinburgh's Caledonian hotel. This is kind of amazing. One of the Sex and the City gals – the best one – is going to saunter into a busy public area of a city centre hotel (off an East Coast train rather than a plane, to boot) without any of the pomp and ceremony of harassed publicists, private suites, make-up artists and room temperature bottled water.

It's not something you can imagine Sarah Jessica Parker, Cattrall's SATC co-star, doing. Then again, you can't really imagine SJP sticking two fingers up at Hollywood to play an ageing porn star in a small time indie flick either.

Anyway, it doesn't turn out how Cattrall planned. The tiny matter of being an A-list superstar gets in the way. And so, walking past the photographers and fangirls outside the hotel, I head upstairs to a modest room, procured at the 11th hour by a publicist. "Autograph hunters," she whispers to me outside the door. "Kim wasn't expecting it."

Inside, Cattrall is sitting on a sofa, legs crossed, looking, as her most famous character Samantha Jones would say, fabulous. She is wearing a slinky beige dress and strappy sandals, her toes painted crimson. She looks slim, fit and smaller than I expected, which makes you think SJP must be the size of a cosmopolitan. Her blonde hair kicks out around her classically beautiful face, all dewy skin and high cheekbones. It is also clearly, and radically for a 54-year-old Hollywood actress, a face untouched by "work". She pats the cushion beside her. "Come and sit next to me," she purrs with a smile. And what an instantly recognisable smile it is: the wrinkled up nose, the narrowing of the ready-to-laugh eyes (with actual, bona fide crow's feet!), the glimpse of white teeth, the sense that a wink might be coming. It is utterly and unmistakeably the smile of Samantha.

"She gave me a life," Cattrall tells me when I ask how Samantha changed her. SATC was Cattrall's first TV show; she turned it down three times before accepting what would become one of the most successful US series of all time at the age of 41. "She gave me a life after 40 in this business. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now if it wasn't for Samantha Jones."

Cattrall is nothing like Samantha. Of course she isn't. We're talking about a SATC character: a larger-than-life, outlandish creation dreamed up by gay men and single women who, over the course of six series and two films, slept with most of Manhattan, survived breast cancer, and nailed some of the best lines ever written for a woman, let alone a woman over 40. "I'm a trysexual – I'll try anything once." "I'd like him to amuse my bouche." And perhaps, most controversially, "I love you, but I love me more."

And yet … meeting Cattrall is a disarming experience. She looks like her most famous character, smiles like her, laughs like her. "I loved her," she tells me, and for the few people holding out for a SATC 3, after the car crash that was the last film, note the past tense. "She was so powerful, so positive, and her choices!" She sighs, as if mourning a lost lover. "I thought she was fantastic." But Cattrall is nothing like her, showing just how good an actress she is. Cattrall is more thoughtful, serious, and intellectual. She also has a very different voice, breathless and actorly and has a vintage star quality about her, as though she has swept in to Edinburgh from another age. (In fact she was one of the last actors to participate in the old studio system, signing a contract with Universal in 1976.)

"I remember reading half the book by Candace Bushnell and throwing it across the room," she admits when I ask what she initially made of SATC. "I found it so depressing – about women who are ready and men who are running. I just felt it was … urgh. How can you make a half-hour series out of this? And a comedy? So I kept turning it down. I didn't want to go in that direction in my forties …" Eventually the partner of the show's writer and producer, Darren Starr, convinced her to read for the part. "I agreed to meet Darren one more time and we went to HBO and I read for them," she says. "They had hired someone else but they let her go and hired me."

Now, in her fifties, Cattrall is making some of the best work of her career. Roman Polanski directed her in The Ghost, she starred opposite Matthew Macfadyen in Noel Coward's Private Lives in the West End, played Shakespeare's Egyptian queen to rave reviews in Anthony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse (she is from Liverpool but mostly grew up in Canada), and now in Meet Monica Velour she plays an ageing porn star.

Has ageing, conversely, been liberating for her as an actor? "Most people look at ageing as a disease," she says. "They do. They have prescriptions and places where you go to eradicate it. I need a place to age."

She seems to have found one: the stage (her first and true love), and European and independent cinema. Are the roles she's playing now more interesting than the ones in her twenties and thirties? "I'm drawn to roles because they excite me intellectually and emotionally," she says. "So yes, in some ways I agree that my best work is now. Maybe I'm a character actress in a leading lady's body." She flashes me another Samantha smile. Her looks used to get in the way. In the Eighties Cattrall's talent was wasted and she ended up playing the hot blonde who stood around fulfilling male fantasies while the guys got the jokes (Porky's, Police Academy). As she puts it, she was "sexualised" by the film industry early on. "I think I'm taking chances now that I was never secure enough to take as a younger actress," she says. "I did it on stage instead, with the classics." So at the same time that she was doing Porky's, she was at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles doing Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge. In fact, as she has said herself, her film and theatre CVs might as well belong to two different actresses.

"At the beginning I did Porky's to pay my rent," she says. "I don't come from a wealthy family – we were working class. So I thought, 'great, nobody is going to see this movie and I'll be able to pay my rent for eight months'." She clicks her fingers, which she often does. "But this movie became a huge hit and I was sexualised in a way that changed the course of my film career. But I don't have any regrets."

That's because she had the theatre, which permitted her to keep doing the one thing she craved: to act. "So if I didn't work in television or film, if I didn't have the right look, I never took it personally," she explains. "Because there was always the theatre. I'm not a nihilist, I'm an optimist. And that has served me well in this profession."

Meet Monica Velour is the closest she has come to theatre in film. And it shows in her mature, dignified character study of a woman living out the consequences of having been sexualised all her life. If SATC showed the empowered, suited and Manolo Blahniked side of female sexuality, Meet Monica Velour shines a light on its dark side: the vulnerability and violence, the hopelessness and rejection. The first thing Cattrall says to me about the film, which is going straight to DVD, is "I've waited my whole career to get a role like this".

Meet Monica Velour, by first-time writer/director Keith Bearden, doesn't live up to Cattrall's performance (though it's a lot better than many films that get a general release). Still, it's about a woman we rarely see represented on screen. Monica Velour is a 47-year-old former porn star, living in a trailer, estranged from her daughter, drunk and drugged, overweight and angry. We first meet her at a sleazy roadside strip club, dancing in her underwear, looking fragile, tired and – whisper it – old, her eyes deadened as the men around her call her "grandma". Cattrall was so upset by the catcalls when she acted the scene that she wept afterwards in her dressing room.

"I felt such sympathy for this character," she tells me, and her eyes glisten as she puts her hand to her chest in a way that's showy but also real. "I wanted so much to give her dignity. It was hard when I first saw the film to see myself – Kim! – looking like this. You spend your life as a woman wanting to look attractive and this … it sticks in you. The amazing thing was, I couldn't find me in the performance. My older sister said that too. She didn't like it. She loves Samantha because she is pretty and happy and strong. But we couldn't find me in this. And that's when you hit a whole new level in your work. It's not acting. It's being."

She was drawn to the project because it terrified her. "It wasn't just about the weight gain, changing your voice, no hair and make-up, it was finding the guts of this woman. It was a huge departure for me and it has whet my appetite for this kind of work. On set it was like playing jazz." She clicks her fingers a few times and shimmies on the sofa. "Effortless. When I was very young I worked with Jack Lemmon and I asked him, 'how do you have longevity in this job?' He told me, 'keep doing things that scare you'. It's the only way to evolve. And, you know, if you don't keep evolving in nature you die. I don't want to play one character for the rest of my life."

Cattrall was born in Liverpool in 1956 but by the time she was three months old her family had emigrated to Canada. When she was 11 she returned to Liverpool to stay with her grandmother, who was unwell.

They ended up going to see the RSC perform As You Like It at the Playhouse and, just like that, Cattrall saw her future. "I don't know how you explain those moments in your life," she says. "I've just read Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, and she talks about seeing The Doors and the same thing happening. Well, when I saw Janet Suzman's Rosalinde on stage it happened to me."

And, in a serendipitous twist, last year Suzman directed her as Cleopatra on the same stage. "Now she's a dear, dear friend," Cattrall sighs. "It's thrilling to me. How did this happen? It's kind of spooky and weird. But it did. It really did happen."

She studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from the precocious age of 11 becoming one of the prestigious school's youngest graduates at 16. And then, after further study in Vancouver and New York, she headed for LA and made her film debut in Otto Preminger's Rosebud. He was a difficult and abusive director, famously telling the 17-year-old Cattrall: "Darling, you remind me of Marilyn Monroe – not in looks, of course, but in lack of talent".

Those early years were difficult. "I got to LA and they said I had to lose weight, let my hair grow and buy some dresses. I was nailing auditions with my readings but they wouldn't hire me because I wasn't putting on the glam. It just didn't occur to me. I didn't think I had to become something else. I thought the thing I would become would be the character. But they wanted me to come in and look sexy and winsome. I didn't know how to play that game."

What did she do? "My agent took me shopping. I got some high heels. It was very awkward and embarrassing for me. I felt like a duckling. I wasn't comfortable in the pond. And all these other women were so comfortable. So I thought OK, I'll get on with it." And she did, though she never really played the game. At least on the big screen, this meant Cattrall didn't get the career she deserved. Not that she would say this herself – her focus is on her theatre work. But there is something brave and uncompromising about her, which is probably why success has come via the stage door. She seems to have sacrificed a lot for her love of acting and has said that her three marriages (she is single) suffered for it and also meant she never had time for children.

But saying exactly what she thinks has had its advantages. Cattrall was the one who refused to sign up to the SATC films until she was guaranteed an equitable salary, even as much as Sarah Jessica Parker, who had always earned the most as the original star and producer. She held out and in the end got what she wanted.

Then, when the world became convinced she was a sexpert who had mastered every position in the universe, she wrote three books about sex. But they weren't about her capacity for multiple orgasms. Quite the opposite. "I was being stamped as someone who knew about sex," she says. "And I didn't. My sexual trajectory was not a happy one. It was very complicated, as it is for most women. It's scary to ask questions and know yourself and experiment. I sort of got in touch with all that in my forties. So I decided to use my platform to tell the truth."

Now, she is facing her next battle with Hollywood – ageing. "All these anti-ageing creams, potions and pills," she says, wrinkling her nose in distaste. "Ageing is challenging, don't get me wrong. Things are changing and they've been the same for a while. I'm trying to embrace it as much as possible. And I'm lucky. There is so much more information about health and taking good care of yourself now. My mother didn't have that." Her face brightens into a Samantha Jones smile, though I'm starting to realise it belongs to Kim Cattrall. "It's like Bette Davis said," she notes, the wink a distinct possibility. "Old age is no place for sissies."

• Meet Monica Velour is out now on DVD

• This article first appeared in The Scotsman on Saturday 16 July 2011