Kim, Samantha and Sex and the City

In the flesh, Kim Cattrall is astonishingly, surprisingly, beautiful - much more delicate and much less

In fact, it's her size that truly startles: she's petite to the point of fragility, dressed all in black, softly-spoken, feline. Her husband, the third, saw her in a crowded bar, she says, and offered to take her home on the spot, S& TC-style, dazzled by her good looks. It's easy to see why: at 45, she has perfectly taut skin, sleek, high cheek bones, hands manicured by a French genius, and a waistline the size of a schoolgirl's.

Cattrall wouldn't appreciate the adjective "brassy", though, to describe the sexually predatory, life-loving Samantha. It's too judgmental; too anti-feminist perhaps. Personally, I've never been sure whether S&TC, series one and two of which are about to be repeated on the Paramount Comedy Channel, is a feminist show or not - I think it confirms as many female stereotypes as it destroys; the shoe fetishism thing, for example - but Cattrall is convinced of its sisterly credentials. "I think this show really raises the bar for honesty as far as women go and for the wholeness of women, and how they act," she whispers, her language tending to spill over into Californian therapese (she uses the rather vacuous phrase "personal growth" a lot). "Women have never been allowed to talk like they do in this show. They're not just mothers or girlfriends, or wives; they're whole women who have appetites and dreams and desires."

Samantha, of course, has enormous appetites and desires. In Cattrall's favourite episode of S&TC, which she calls the "gherkin episode", Samantha finally, finally finds a man she can really love, the perfect soul-mate, only then to discover what's in his lunch-box - the gherkin. It's really tragic, this, since Samantha simply can't bear not to have good sex, and has to dump him.

"The thing is," says Cattrall, "she doesn't get punished for her decisions in that show. She enjoys sex, she loves the thrill of it and she's not judged for it. For being too male. There's never been a comedy so out there like that."

For me, the most feminist part of S&TC isn't this obvious sexual liberation, however, but the portrayal of non- jealous, rock-hard female friendship. Every single time, no matter what the situation with lovers, the four women stick firmly together, the importance of their friendship easily outweighing that of sexual relations with men.

It turns out, meanwhile, that sex defines Cattrall just as much as it defines Samantha. The conversation takes an intensely intimate turn when we discuss the book she's written with her husband Mark Levinson, a music industry businessman, entitled Satisfaction, the Art of the Female Orgasm. Tabloid reports in America falsely suggested that the original publishers of this book, Simon and Schuster, turned it down for being too raunchy. In fact, says Cattrall, she and her husband pulled out of the deal because S&S "wanted me to write a book of Samantha Says Sex Tips, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of book, which wasn't what I wanted to do at all". The book she wanted to and subsequently did for new publishers, was a practical guide to good sex - a kind of non-objective, highly specific Kamasutra for the liberated woman and her eager-to-please partner; a book that emerged very definitely from her own experience.

"Most of my life hasn't been very fulfilling sexually," she says, straight off the bat. "It was very frustrating and depressing. At one point in my mid-thirties, I thought to myself, maybe I'm just not a very sexual woman. I play women who are sexually conscious and aware, but maybe I'm going to be more like my mum, not particularly active. It was a very sad time for me."

And then what? Along came superstud Mark? "Sure, I found the right guy. I found the glue that holds our relationship together in a very profound way, and having lived so long without that component in my relationships, and now living with it, I realised how wonderful and different it was. It became clear to me that a lot of women don't have very satisfactory sex lives, and a lot of the reason for that is because some men do, but most men don't, know how to bring it about."

Cattrall assures me that the book is all done, as Kenny Everett used to say, in the best possible taste, though one wonders what sales figures for Satisfaction etc will be like in hers and Everett's home town of Liverpool, where young men (and women for that matter) aren't renowned for progressive attitudes towards sex.

Cattrall left Liverpool for rural Canada with her parents - dad a construction worker, mum a housewife - when she was little, and earned some social cachet as a child by virtue of having roots in the city of the Beatles. In Canada, life was pretty hard for an aspiring actress. The family had no TV; there was no theatre in the town and just one cinema, run by the army. Cattrall nevertheless took herself off to New York as a teenager, to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Classical theatre and a succession of mostly low-profile film parts followed, with the honourable exception of Lt Valeris in the sixth Star Trek movie, until S&TC, first broadcast in 1998, made her truly rich and very famous.

In between, Cattrall suffered several weird and nasty brushes with her own mortality: in 1988, she was booked onto Pan Am flight 103, the plane that crashed into Lockerbie, but she changed her schedule at the last minute. She has had a threatening stalker. She regrets never having children, though didn't feel strongly enough as a younger woman to take the advice of friends and "go off to a sperm bank".

What Cattrall doesn't seem to have, albeit on a brief meeting, and what S&TC has in spades, is a sense of true naughtiness; that mischievous twinkle that you often find in the eyes of young women in Liverpool's numerous bars. She lives most of the time in Long Island where "my life is really about breath, because I can breathe out there" she says, dewily.

I respect her sexual openness and really respect the way she looks after herself, but, you know, a round of Cosmopolitans with Samantha would, I suspect, be a lot more fun.

Series one and two of Sex and the City starts on The Paramount Comedy Channel, Monday, 7 January, 10.30pm.