Sex, Lies and Samantha Jones
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
Last night as I was watching Samantha Jones on the West End in London, I kept wondering, where’s Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte?
And what’s with the British accent? Who are you? Madonna?
That’s not to take anything away from Kim Cattrall’s performance as Amanda in the new revival of the Noël Coward play Private Lives at the Vaudeville Theatre. Her British accent was spot on (as it should be; she is, after all, technically a native Brit); she tackles her maneater role with relish, aplomb and all those clever turns of phrase that movie and theater reviewers live to type; and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.
But I kept wondering, why is Samantha so hung up on this boor of a man who belittles and hits her?
Then I came crashing back to reality.
In all seriousness, Kim Cattrall did an incredible job. And if I didn’t usually have Samantha Jones on the brain anyway, I probably wouldn’t have given her most famous alter ego a second thought. With her performance in the current Roman Polanski-directed film The Ghost Writer getting good reviews, Cattrall is proving that there is life beyond Sex and the City.
As I watched her sashay about the stage, chewing the scenery and commenting on it, to0 (when a stage prop fell, she ad libbed, “I’ll have to get that fixed”), I thought about all of the roles she could tackle: Martha in Who’s Afraid of the Virginia Woolf?. Mrs. Robinson. Edie Britt in the 2012 stage version of Desperate Housewives. She could have the career Kathleen Turner was supposed to have in her 50s if she hadn’t burned out around thirtysomething.
Now excuse me while I check the movie listings. The Ghost Writer is playing at a theater near me, and I hear Samantha Jones is just fabulous in it.
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You’re forgetting her greatest role, in perhaps the greatest B movie of all time: she played Gracie Law, Chinatown lawyer and do-gooder in the Kurt Russell action comedy Big Trouble in Little China.
Which must NOT be missed.
Lorraine, I knew I liked your column for some reason.
“Big Trouble…” is one of the underappreciated movies of my (I assume yours as well) generation.
Hooray!
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[...] genteel Darcy — opposite Kim Cattrall in the hit West End revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. He also had a role in the Oscar-nominated Frost/Nixon a couple of years ago, and will soon turn up [...]