Time to Sex up her City

I hear Kristin Davis before I see her - a loud, staccato laugh machine-gunning the air as she skips into the posh New York studio to have her picture taken. Her hair is scraped back off her perfect, porcelain face - all doe eyes, bare lips and innocent resolve, with her mouth set in that familiar wide smile.

She has just finished nine consecutive nights in The Exonerated, an off-Broadway play about death row inmates. It couldn't be further from the subject matter of Sex and the City, where Davis made her name as prissy Charlotte. And the news that our favourite American import is being axed is fine with Davis - - she is, she says, fed up with being thought of as uptight and prudish.

Davis insists that although the character of Charlotte has started to rub off on her (the show has run for six years) there are still big differences between the two. "I'm perceived as being exactly like her," she moans. "I like my character a lot - she's a really nice person - and I don't mind people thinking I'm as sweet and good-natured as she is. But I'm desperate to break free. I'm so much sexier than Charlotte. If someone starts talking to me as if I'm Charlotte, I start to swear a lot."

Davis has a far wider range of emotions than Charlotte does. "I'm really bad-tempered. I get mad," she explains. "There are so many times when I've been playing Charlotte when I've begged the director to let me yell at somebody, or punch them. But I would always be told no."

Today Davis, 38, has come to the photo shoot determined to throw off her alter ego. She wants to be transformed from a wide-eyed innocent into a vampy sex goddess, and she's brought her own nude G-string for the occasion. She picks up a sheer, black-chiffon, corseted dress. "I love it," she squeals excitedly. "Charlotte would never, ever wear anything like this."

The actress had a conventional upbringing in South Carolina. Her mother, Dorothy, was a university data analyst; her father, Keith, a professor of psychology. At first, Sex and the City caused problems with her parents - they didn't like it and hid videotapes of the series from her grandmother, who lived with them.

Davis turned down a Playboy shoot on the grounds of parental disapproval. "I was flattered," she says, "but my mother would never have spoken to me again." Davis says that she grew up in a "bookish environment". Unlike Charlotte, who leafs obsessively through the pages of Vogue, Davis's all-time favourite read is War and Peace.

And was she all prim and proper like Charlotte back then? "To the outside world, perhaps. But I drank a lot, which was rebellious, especially because my parents didn't drink. I could often be found getting pissed on bourbon behind the school gym with boys."

In fact, by the time she hit her mid-twenties, drinking had turned into a problem, so she decided she had to quit. "I consider myself to be an alcoholic," she says. "My drinking became a very real addiction that needed to be dealt with."

What made her become an alcoholic? "I think it was inherited in a way. In the South pretty much everyone drinks. There was always a lot of alcohol, lots of access to alcohol, people sitting around every night with a mint julep," she explains. "Although it's not an excuse, drinking was just part of the charm of the South." Davis found alcohol liberating. "It made it easier for me to be outgoing. I'm shy and it helped me overcome that. After a while I just got used to being drunk."

Davis considers herself lucky. "I figured out early on that I had a problem, before I moved to New York in the Eighties to break into acting. I wouldn't have been able to handle success had I not already dealt with my alcoholism. Sometimes it would be nice to have a glass of wine with dinner, but it's not worth the risk."

Her parents encouraged their shy daughter into acting in the hope that it might give her confidence. But her first big break didn't come until she was 27, when America's hotshot producer, Darren Star, cast her in Melrose Place. Three years later, Star asked Davis to audition again - this time for the part of Carrie in Sex and the City.

Davis told him she didn't think she was right for audacious Carrie, and that she'd prefer to play Charlotte. "I couldn't have done another part," she admits. "Cynthia [Nixon] has no fear, no embarrassment. They say, 'Cynthia, we'd like you to be topless,' and she just says, 'Okay.' And then some man will be squishing her breasts between his fingers in a really unattractive way and I'm like ... [she gasps dramatically] 'Tell them you can't do that!' And I couldn't pull off what Kim [Cattrall] does. Not in a million years. I'm just not that kind of person," she says with a mock-brisk toss of her hair.

"I'm just not that free with my body. I couldn't say a lot of the stuff she says - I'm not that bold." Davis, who is the only character to have married on-screen, was for a long time also the only single woman in real life (Cattrall's marriage has only recently collapsed). She has been linked to a series of stars, the latest being Alec Baldwin.

She's reluctant to discuss her love life. "Because I was the only single woman on the show, there is a strange intensity of attention on my personal life and my feelings about men and sex. I'm still trying to figure it out for myself."

So, what would a man have to do to impress Kristin Davis? "I don't know," she giggles. "I'm from the South so I find a man in a pair of frayed old khakis really sexy. Very worn, very lived in and definitely not pressed," she says in mock southern belle drawl. "And I like a man who wears shoes with no socks. You can tell a lot about a man from his shoes."

What about a man who has a bigger wardrobe than she does? "No! But I doubt that would be possible. I get a lot of free stuff."

Davis says she will miss the show, especially her co-stars. "The four of us have been through a lot. None of us is perfect, including me. But for most of the year when we are working, we do everything together, we spend our whole lives together, 18 hours a day."

Is she panicking about what to do next? "It's too far away to think about. We don't end working until February 2004. We have a marathon to run before that."

But she must feel pressurised to line up new projects? "I'd love to do a movie, a romantic comedy, but only if I could find one that was better than the show."

Photographs courtesy of FHM Collections, on sale today.