Sarah Jessica Parker's Big revelation
The trailer for the Sex and the City movie is playing on a loop in the press suite on the 20th floor of the Ritz Carlton, New York, and there's no denying - it's masterly.
Four years after the hit TV series ended, the film is everything that made the show a cult: the four girlfriends in arms are even more glossy (they look younger), the fashion more fabulous, and in a clever leap forwards, the leading women have all moved on and settled with their men, or, in the case of Carrie Bradshaw, are about to marry Big.
Sarah Jessica Parker, 43, has become a worldwide name due to her role as writer Carrie Bradshaw in the seminal TV series Sex And The City. She admits to being nervous about the release of the big screen version out later this month
"I always knew she would," coos Charlotte.
"You thought that after the second break-up?" Samantha enquires dubiously.
"After the 15th?" wisecracks Miranda.
She's so flawless on screen that it's a reality check when Sarah Jessica Parker high-steps into the room like a just-tamed colt.
She's doll-small - tiny, thin as a six-year-old - with none of the screen's stardust glow.
She's weirdly both Carrie and not Carrie - she has her enthusiastic voice and crazily toned legs, barely supported on towering Brian Atwood heels, and long, loosely curled blond-brown hair.
But she's also slighter and paler, with a business-like way of chewing gum, her pinched face matt with foundation, sheer pale lipstick overflowing a rosebud mouth, grey eyeshadow above thick mascaraed black lashes.
In the movie she's a golden girl; today, on a gilt chair in a room overlooking Central Park, SJP looks like a normal 43-year-old mum, if skinnier, faint lines running round her eyes and along her forehead.
The SATC dream team: Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica and Kristen Davis
It's not really surprising. Today she's ill and barely managed to make this interview, having cancelled yesterday's after her son, James, got a stomach bug while her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, was away.
"So I'm wearing a lot of make-up!" she exclaims wryly.
She shakes her head contritely.
"I'm so sorry about that. I would never miss work, ever.
"But I was throwing up every 20 minutes from 11 o'clock last night, round the clock.
"My son had it on Monday evening and he threw up straight through to 8am the next morning.
"By Tuesday I thought, 'Guess I dodged that!' Then at 6.30pm on Wednesday I was, like, 'Urgh!'"
She meets your eyes as she talks and uses her blue-veined hands in more down-to-earth gestures than her skittish sex columnist alter ego would have.
She's also cleverer, generous with her answers and time, if a touch more passive-aggressive than her sweet-natured alter ego - she occasionally deliberately misunderstands questions, repeating them with a perplexed air and then pulling back with a sweet, "Oh, sorry!"
Original: the actresses in a 1998 promotional image for the series
It's common knowledge that SJP wanted to make the movie right after the series ended in February 2004, but Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha Jones, wouldn't get on board. Sarah Jessica rolls her eyes at the notion that the two fell out.
"How tired is that?" she groans.
So the film didn't go ahead then, "...because Kim didn't want to do it at the time," she finishes briskly for me.
"But the story they never tell with that is that no one ever denied her that choice.
"Were we disappointed? Yes.
"If it's about money, so be it. That's her choice."
And evidently that changed?
"Well, time passed," she says.
"And I really wanted Kim to do this movie. I didn't want to do it without her and it was important to me to get her back and to make her feel comfortable."
She admits to being nervous about it. Out later this month, the film is very much Sarah Jessica's project - she not only plays the lead but produced it as well (it was written and directed by Michael Patrick King).
'I just recognised that it was the right time, we couldn't let two more years pass, and there was an interesting story to tell, four years later,' Sarah Jessica says of the movie
"I just recognised that it was the right time, we couldn't let two more years pass, and there was an interesting story to tell, four years later," she remarks.
"And this couldn't be a movie about a bunch of girls running round New York having sex - I mean, it would just seem gratuitous, it's not where we ended the show.
"Unless you want to go back in time, and how do we do that? And I think Michael illustrates in the first few minutes of the movie how Carrie has been very successful in the past four years," she goes on.
"She's in a very successful relationship with a grown-up (ie, Chris Noth's Mr Big), she has figured things out.
"She really believes she knows this man and herself, and she's had a lot of satisfaction in work - she's had two more books published and she's working on her fourth.
"So she's a different person, just as all of us are after four years."
So the movie is deeper than the series?
Sarah Jessica nods. "Oh yeah. I hope so. It's more about grown women now."
She grins when asked if she herself would have gone for the complicated Big had she been single in real life (in the 1980s she lived with the actor Robert Downey Jr, who has struggled with drug addiction and spent time in jail, and she reportedly dated the late JFK Jr and the actor Nicolas Cage, so she has had her share of tricky men).
Sarah Jessica says of Carrie's relationship with Big (played by Chris Noth): 'I don't know if I would have stuck with a person like that. I don't know if I'd have had that fortitude'
"Umm," she ponders. "Physically? I might have been attracted to that. There's a lot that's seductive.
"I think he's a really interesting person. And the moment anyone keeps things from you it's like a magnet - you're drawn. He's a bright person and successful; if someone throws you enough bones, you go!
"But I don't know if I would have stuck with a person like that. I don't know if I'd have had that fortitude."
She seems to have chosen more wisely with Broderick, who she's been married to for 11 years.
Despite her recent confession on an American TV show that Matthew is "a complicated person" and they've had some "treacherous train rides", Sarah Jessica still thinks they have a good marriage: "It's a real privilege to be part of, but that doesn't mean I have any tips for anybody else about how to conduct theirs!
"I do think we're at an advantage living in New York, because we are in a town with other businesses and other industries, and I think that has allowed us not to be under the same sort of speculation that actors in Hollywood endure."
The couple live in a Greenwich Village townhouse with James, five. Sarah Jessica paints a down-to-earth picture of daily life, with her doing the school run and the chores.
"When I'm working we have the same nanny that James has had since he was four months old, this extraordinary lady named Myleena," she says, "and when I'm working she takes him to school, if Matthew can't. If Matthew can't pick him up she'll pick him up.
"And in the evenings, if I'm night shooting, or I have to go out, we have a lovely young lady named Kady. So he's had the same people his whole life, and they're amazing, and they're not overworked.
"I think we have really figured out how to work the house, and his needs are obviously the most important. He seems pretty content."
'Sure! I'm riddled with them (insecurities)! But as you get older you get better equipped to deal with them,' says Sarah Jessica
Six years ago she said she wanted "as many babies as is healthy" and two and a half years ago confided that she was longing for a daughter.
Now, she says, "It's a subject I don't talk about because no matter what you say, either it's, 'Poor Sarah Jessica, she wants more and hasn't had them,' or, if I say, 'No, we're quite content,' they say, 'What a cold, heartless, selfish...' So I don't talk about it."
As the youngest of eight (she has three siblings and four half-siblings), Sarah Jessica will say she is conscious that her son is growing up in extreme affluence compared to her childhood.
Her parents divorced when she was a baby and her mother Barbra got remarried to a truck driver. Sarah Jessica was raised in Cincinnati in poverty: "The problem with talking about it is that people like to put a Dickensian twist on it as if I were an orphan," she says.
"There were times when we didn't have electricity because we didn't pay the bill on time - we simply didn't have the money that month - and sometimes we relied on the government for free lunches.
"But my parents were very clever and industrious; culturally our lives were very rich, even though, in practical ways, things were kind of a mess."
Sarah Jessica has been married to actor Matthew Broderick for 11 years
She doesn't regret it, though. On the contrary, she is grateful.
Poverty gave her, she says, a work ethic.
"I started working at the age of eight (when she was the lead in a production of The Little Match Girl) and I've never borrowed a penny from anybody.
"I think it's a real privilege to grow up the way I did, and I think my son's strangely at a disadvantage because he's a child of affluence and he doesn't know what that means.
"That is a great concern to me. I almost wish we could create a false universe for him - I know this is going to be misinterpreted across the world, but I think there is something good about not having much."
I tell her Nigella Lawson recently remarked that she would not leave money to her children for the same reason.
"I understand that!" Sarah Jessica exclaims. "I think sometimes people interpret it as saying that a child of privilege has it worse than a child of nothing, and that's not at all what I'm saying.
"But I get concerned when a child's every whim is met and it's hard not to meet those whims when you have the money to do so."
She certainly does. Not long ago Sarah Jessica was named the richest woman in New York, an accolade that she maintains is not true.
She nevertheless has made millions, not from the series (the women were never paid that much), but from her best-selling fragrances, Lovely and Covet; Gap adverts; a deal with the cosmetics firm Garnier; a reputed £3.5 million fee for designing a clothing line, Bitten, for the US chain Steve & Barry's (in which everything costs under £10, in a nod towards her upbringing); her position as the face of Lux, and now the new movie.
Yet what's interesting about meeting her in the flesh is that this uber-celebrity not only looks perfectly normal but lives a normal life.
Sarah Jessica maintains that she doesn't go to Fashion Week, because, "If I had that kind of time I would be with my son, and the fashion shows are so intimidating", and insists that she only shops twice a year.
"It really doesn't happen much, so I borrow a lot and I treat it well."
Today, for instance, she is in a grey Versace jacket, beige Halston dress and Fendi clutch - far less quirky than Carrie - "and none of it mine!" (Later, Kristin Davis wanders in in pointed black stiletto boots and shiny black coat - a conversely racy and un-Charlotte-like outfit.)
My final question to this mega-star is if she has any insecurities.
This makes her stare in amazement.
"Sure! I'm riddled with them!" she exclaims.
"But as you get older you get better equipped to deal with them.
"It doesn't mean you triumph over them all the time. But I think insecurity can be a great motivator - as long as it doesn't rule the way you work in ways that are not helpful."
By now her PR is virtually tearing her hair out and brandishing her watch, so Sarah Jessica climbs gracefully on to her high heels.
"Thank you so much!" she cries and trips out of the room.
