Kim plays it tough

Kim Cattrall sounds nothing like her Sex And The City counterpart Samantha. Her voice down the telephone is like silk - so light and breathy it threatens to fly away. 'Yes, but is it sexy in an older woman kind of way?' a male friend wanted to know. Not really. She sounds like a winsome little girl - disconcerting in a woman going on 50.

It has been Cattrall's fortune to remain closely identified with the heroically sexually rapacious Samantha ever since Sex And The City became required viewing for millions of women - and men. As the fortysomething woman who slept her way around Manhattan like a modern-day Don Juan, Cattrall's character quickly established herself as a fantasy figurehead for 21st-century female sexual emancipation.

Cattrall's own achievement was arguably worthier of celebration: a career that took off in middle-age with a glamorous role that celebrated older women as sexual beings. Pretty quickly, the public gap between Cattrall and Samantha became dangerously close, compounded when Cattrall co-wrote a guide to sexual satisfaction with her then husband Mark Levinson and took to talking openly about her new-found sexual fulfillment.

Today, Cattrall is in town to promote a very different character: Claire Harrison, the paralysed protagonist of Brian Clark's play Whose Life Is It Anyway? Claire has no chance of recovering any feeling in her body from the waist down and, deciding she no longer wants her new impotent existence, takes her fight to refuse the treatment that keeps her alive to court. Is there much of Samantha, and, by implication, Kim, in Claire?

'They are both brave, courageous, intelligent women,' Cattrall says. 'There are certain roles I gravitate towards because of who I am as Kim - tough, smart and sexy. Both Samantha and Claire are very sexual. The tragedy for Claire is that she can't express it.'

This sexual element has been heightened in the play thanks to a neat gender swap: the part was originally written for a man.

It's certainly an aspect Cattrall herself has leapt on - her delicately delivered talk is peppered with fragrant reference to how comfortable she is sexually.

More interesting is the play's ultimately ambivalent stance on the subject of assisted suicide, in cases where an accident has rendered a person's life seemingly intolerable. Where does Cattrall herself stand?

'It's always been very clear to me,' she says. 'I've been touched personally by two friends who were disabled; one was Christopher Reeve. Both had children and a marriage so there was a great desire to stay. I'm not in a long-term relationship and don't have children, so I don't know how I might feel; but I know I would want the right to choose.'

Cattrall likes the fact that the subject of this play is provocative. 'I know people who see it will be more interested when they next see a report in the paper about stem cell research, for example, where previously they might not have bothered. I love the way theatre connects people,' she continues.