Kim Cattrall
By:
August 21, 2009
The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth — that is, she was playing Samantha Jones in lowbrow movies years before Darren Star cast her as a mature vamp in the middlebrow Sex and the City. Watch Cattrall run around with the boys in Porky’s; dress up in full geisha gear and sardonically cry, “Way to go, Jack!” at Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China; or display more personality as a dummy than the ostensibly human Andrew McCarthy does in Mannequin. Sure, she was cast as eye candy, but the power she wields over men wasn’t only due to her sharp cheekbones. Her confident posture and occasional flares of exasperation reveal that Cattrall’s characters are always ten steps ahead of everyone else on the screen. In throwaway scenes where other ’80s-era ingénues would have screamed or simpered, Cattrall forces viewers to remember her — because she’d be back some day, when our desire and maturity had finally coalesced.
On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: | Aubrey Beardsley | Jackie De Shannon |
READ MORE about members of the Original Generation X (1954–1963).