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           She’s unfathomably familiar and empathic. Not just because we’ve seen her endlessly as Carrie in Sex And The City but because she has an uncanny ability to relate to vulnerability everywhere: Whether lonely and looking for love in Manhattan, juggling a job, a husband and kids as she did recently in I Don’t Know How She Does It, or as the mother of a rebellious 15-year-old in her new movie New Year’s Eve.
As she throws off her Giuseppe Zanotti black and white patent leather shoes in her New York hotel room she gives off just a hint of tiredness and jokes that the geranium red corset bodiced Oscar de la Renta dress will be returned tomorrow. ‘You can wear it next,’ she offers.
In real life her wardrobe is ‘Anything I can put on quickly and not embarrass my son.’ It’s practical, about being a mum. She does not share an insatiable appetite for shoes like her iconic character Carrie. I think she’d be ashamed to own 300 pairs. If designers want to loan her outfits she’s happy. She’s already bought everybody’s Christmas present yet says, ‘I cringe inside when anybody gives me something. I don’t know why. I just get embarrassed.’
Is she the same way about receiving love? ‘No, I’m not,’ she says with gratitude. When I tell her I’m a fan of her perfume Lovely because it makes me feel emotional she almost purrs with empathy. ‘That’s what I hoped.’
New Year’s Eve is very emotional for her. She’s superstitious that a bad one might mean a bad year so she always likes to be surrounded by her loved ones.
New Year’s Eve the movie has an ensemble cast that includes Jessica Biel, Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher, and it’s set in her beloved Manhattan, for which she was grateful. No long on-location shoots and being separated from her son James Wilkie, now 8 and two-year-old twins Marion Loretta Elwell and Tabitha Hodge, nicknamed Kitty and Babe.
She shudders slightly at the thought of them being rebellious teenagers. She particularly can’t imagine James as being a sulky and uncommunicative adolescent. She says that he loves being with his mother. Their bond is emotional and strong. ‘When he was born the paediatrician called him a hothouse flower’ because he was so delicate. And what did she say of the twins? ‘That one of them was going to look after me and hold my hand at the end and the other one was going to arrange the funeral.’
The twins she says are not at all alike even though they were born 20 seconds apart. ‘One of them likes to be cuddled at a certain time of day, the other a different time. One of them likes to eat all the time, the other only if she’s really hungry. One of them is a Democrat and one of them is a Republican,’ she laughs.
Her movie daughter is 15 and struggling for independence and her mother is struggling to protect her. ‘It’s a case of the tighter the grip the looser the hold.’
Was she ever a rebellious teenager? ‘No. I was already independent. I was already working.’ Indeed her work ethic has always been gargantuan. She first appeared on Broadway as one of the orphans in Annie and took over the role in 1979 when she was 14 and has never stopped working.
She takes work extremely seriously, she’s very much rooted in her humble past. She was born in the coal mining town of Nelsonville, Ohio. Her father Stephen Parker, an aspiring writer, divorced her mother Barbara when she was a toddler. Her mother, a nursery school teacher, met and married lorry driver Paul Forste with whom she had more children. With a total of eight children to feed and clothe her mother was often forced to be rather frugal. I’ve read stories that their electricity was constantly turned off.
‘That’s definitely exaggerated, although there were some Christmases where we went without presents. But my parents gave us so much love. We didn’t have everything we wanted but we had everything we needed.’ She pauses with just a tiny ache in her pause.
‘My mother was a master juggler. If you ask her she’ll say she was a wreck. There’s plenty of screaming that went on in the house but I think it was necessary just to be heard, there were eight children.’ One can’t imagine SJP screaming to be heard. She can get her point across with a breathy whisper.
What did she learn from her mother? ‘Everything. She made so many good choices and tried to do the right thing. I try to replicate it as much as I can,’ she says earnestly.
Her mother provided a childhood rich in culture. They moved to New York City at a time when the arts were very well funded by the city. Most of her siblings ended up in successful careers in the arts.
In I Don’t Know How She Does It she played a woman who is not wealthy and works in a male dominated business (finance) and is a devoted mother. The question to SJP is not just how she does it but why? If one doesn’t have to juggle career and children and husband for financial reasons why do we try?
‘The beauty of this time is that we do have choices and we can support each other in these choices. For me it has been hard to say no. I wanted a family and before I had a family I was a person that was a career person. I tried to marry those two things and sometimes it is successful and sometimes it is not.’
SJP, famous for playing the world’s most famous single woman, must have found it a gruelling adjustment to embrace pregnancy and motherhood.
‘It wasn’t. I stopped working a year after James Wilkie was born so I had a nice amount of time with him. I think the bigger adjustment has been to go from one to three children. It’s a much bigger adjustment than becoming a mother. One child in retrospect seems a cake walk compared to where I stand today. You only know what you know, but you figure it out. My children are a great blessing and I love them. They are the source of all the joy in my life. The main source.’
She ‘tried and tried and tried’ to get pregnant again ‘but it just wasn’t meant to be in the conventional way.’ Her twins, who arrived in June 2009, were birthed by a surrogate using eggs that Parker had previously frozen and husband Matthew Broderick’s sperm.
Did she know that she would be acquiring twins? ‘No, we didn’t. No, we didn’t,’ she says as if the shock still resonates. ‘It was a wonderful shock. But we didn’t know. We understood that it was a possibility, but we didn’t spend a lot of time on the math and the science of it. We were just hopeful that we had one healthy child. We were hoping very much for that and everything else was the cherry on the sundae.’
Was it very different meeting your children rather than giving birth to them? ‘Yes, it is definitely a different experience. You don’t know them as well immediately as you do a child (you’ve given birth to). In my case it was a very different preparation. Everyone is different. You do have an immediate love and affection for them. You know what you want to do and what is instinctual happens. For me it did right away, I can’t speak for other people. Other people have different experiences.’
She’s unfazed by being asked intimidate questions and almost enjoys exposing her vulnerable core, perhaps so that we can bond with that place of insecurity. It wasn’t a choice. ‘I would give birth as often as I could. I loved all the aspects of my pregnancy with our son – the good and the bad.’
She didn’t want James Wilkie to be alone and responsible for looking after his parents when they got old. Wherever possible she likes to bring her children to the set of the movie or work in NYC. She’d only had the twins for a couple of months before Sex In The City 2 meant she had to travel to Morocco.
‘That was rough,’ she says. ‘My daughters were too young for their requisite shots. I was separated from them for a while and that was really distressing.
‘You hope that your children are not terrifically disrupted by the choices you make and you always remind yourself they are the priority.’
What does she have coming up next? ‘Nothing,’ she says with a mixture of wonderment and relief. She’s looking at various scripts, both as a producer and as an actress and hoping that something will work out that works easily for the children that doesn’t require separation.
She and Broderick have been married since May 1997. They share domestic and childcare duties. Broderick seems to be the ultimate domesticated dad. There are always pap shots of him doing the groceries. Does she feel she is able to give him the attention he needs?
‘Yes. He deserves it.’ She tells me that it’s not an imbalance of him always doing the shopping. ‘I always pack for him but I will say this. He shops for me a lot and he cooks for all of us, although he doesn’t pack for me. There are a lot of things he does better than I do, so it balances itself out. I don’t feel taken advantage of. He does lots in the house. We take care of each other.’
A few years ago I read that she said Broderick was a complicated person and they have had “treacherous train rides”. I was wondering how they could fit such high adrenalin into their balanced domesticated bliss. Were the train rides really treacherous? ‘I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true. We’ve been together for 20 years and you have good days, you have decent days, and you have bad days. That’s a marriage. That’s a relationship. That’s a friendship.
‘Relationships outside the marriage run the same course. If you’re in it for the long haul and you want meaningful relationships you are going to go through lots of different periods, and I think that’s important.’
When we find that love, how do we keep it? ‘I think kids can really distract you from it. Maybe in good and bad ways. It’s important to have all eyes on all parts of the relationship. It’s something you really have to pay attention to. Some people are good at it. They have everything planned. Our lives don’t always allow that, but we try.’
When she was growing up is this how she imagined her life would be? ‘No. I would never have imagined this particular life. From a young age I imagined the job that I wanted. And that’s probably as much as I would have ever dreamed of. Everything else has been surprising and miraculous.’
She never dreamt about having a husband and children? ‘I didn’t dream of that,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want it. It was just that I wasn’t one of those girls who dreamed of her wedding day and the birth of her first child. I assumed it was going to happen but I didn’t know when it was going to happen because I was focused on my work. I didn’t suffer for it. I was just pootling along with my life. Then I met someone and it seemed to be right.’
She says it without romantic fanfare. It doesn’t sound like one of those coup de foudre things. She’s already been in a long relationship with the then self-destructive Robert Downey Jr and before that with Nicolas Cage. With Broderick she did not instantly know this was the person she would end up marrying.
‘I don’t know that I thought about that right away. Maybe I recognised it sort of soon. I met this wonderful person and we wanted to be together. And after a while it became apparent that I wanted to be with him longer than temporarily.’
And that had never happened before? ‘No it hadn’t. and I hadn’t thought about it. I was pretty young and I didn’t think about making those big decisions before that.’
Does she think she’ll have any more children? ‘I don’t know,’ she says. Does that mean she’s at least thinking about it? ‘I don’t know she says.’ You imagine part of her would like a giant brood. But that could be technically difficult.
Was it hard to separate from the fictional Carrie? ‘In some ways I don’t feel entirely separated. I’ve spent a long time playing her and I miss her. I don’t want to feel sad or maudlin. I feel lucky. Sex In The City 3 may or may not be in the future, but it’s certainly not in the near future.’
Carrie was easy to relate to, she had so many insecurities. She nods. ‘I think insecurities change and evolve as time marches on and new concerns creep up. Children provide a whole new set of concerns. Who knows what I’ll be insecure about next week. I always have insecurities. A lot of them about work and how it will be received.’
Does she have insecurities about her looks and the ageing process? ‘I try to dress appropriately for my age and I’m a realist about what I look like. If I’m feeling insecure I will be less inclined to keep wearing what I’m wearing. My shoes are fairly high, three inches. I don’t think there is age appropriateness in shoes. Wear whatever your body would allow.
‘If those physical things were my insecurities I would be thrilled. What wonderful problems. My insecurities are more substantial than that. I worry first and foremost about my children, their health. My husband, and his. I worry about what opportunities will come up. My own creative satisfaction. How will I pursue things and will the work be good.’
Her face is botox and filler free. She looks like most women her age, only tinier. Recently there seems to have been a shift - women into their forties, fifties, sixties, that are working in film and television and no longer feel forced to have work done.
‘There’s a long list of women who are working - Helen Mirren, Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep who is in a league of her own. There are women who feel that botox is necessary, but more and more I don’t think it is important for the industry. People want to make movies that are successful, and sometimes they include women and sometimes they don’t. I think it’s less and less about exterior. At least I would hope so. I’m an eternal optimist.’
The only thing she knows for sure about the future is that she wants to be part of her children’s lives day to day – their school life, their play times, getting ready for a family Christmas. She’s happy with that. ‘More than anything I love those times.’