While the crew on the forthcoming Sex and the City: The Movie has spent
the past 18 months desperately trying to keep the plot under wraps, one cast
member has been struggling with a far weightier secret: Cynthia Nixon, who
plays lawyer Miranda Hobbes, has been battling against breast cancer.
Speaking on a recent American chat show, the 42-year-old actress revealed
that during a routine mammogram in 2006 a tumour was diagnosed. She went on
to say that she didn’t want her scare to become public knowledge while she
had surgery to remove the lump.
It was while starring in the off-Broadway production of The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie that she received the diagnosis. “I felt scared,” she has
said, “but I was very cognisant of the fact that if it’s going to happen,
this is the best way for it to happen – it’s found so early and we can just
get right on it.”
Her partner, Christine Marinoni, was a vital source of support. The couple
went public in 2004, when they revealed a year-long relationship that
stretched back to Nixon’s split from the musician Danny Mozes, the father of
her two children (Samantha, 11, and Charles, 5). According to reports, Nixon
and Marinoni hope to get married this autumn.
“I have to say that in terms of the particular person I’m with I guess I do
feel that the ideal man is a woman,” laughs Nixon. “I feel like she’s much
more intuitive about what’s going on with me. She’s much more willing to
treat it like a partnership. We eat together, shop and cook together, raise
children together. And there’s much more sense of the task at hand and we
both fit in. I’m in love with her because she’s her; it’s hard to know if
I’d be in love with her if she were a man. If she were a man, would she be
differ-ent? Would she still be this intuitive? Would she still be this
devoted?
“Certainly the kids were fine with our relationship. This is New York City – a
very multicultural world where gay people are not so shocking!”
Nixon was herself born in New York and her first acting role came at the age
of 12, when she starred in a 1979 Afterschool Special for ABC. Her
parents divorced before she hit her teens, and when she was 13, and had just
completed her first big movie, Little Darlings, her mother found out
she had breast cancer. “I remember there were a number of hushed
conversations between my mother and her boyfriend,” she says. “I know she
told me, but I can’t remember the actual moment. It was very matter-of-fact.
My mom is just very streamlined – she doesn’t believe it’s good to make a
fuss.”
The young actress appeared simultaneously in two Broadway plays directed by
Mike Nichols, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and David Rabe’s Hurlyburly,
and also starred in the Best Picture winner Amadeus, playing
Mozart’s tearful maid. She still lives in New York, on the Upper West Side,
and says that she feels it is easier for an actress to age on the East Coast
rather than in Hollywood. “It’s much easier to be in New York because
there’s a higher level of reality as to what people should look like,” she
says.
However, Nixon concedes that the tabloid frenzy that accompanied her
confession to a lesbian relationship was rather startling. “Certainly the
attention was a wild, crazy thing. It was like a fire; it flared for a bit
and then died down to a slow burn. And the nice thing about it was that
really there wasn’t much to say, once we’d said it. People had a week or two
talking about it.” She laughs. “And sometimes they had a hard time
separating me from Miranda in Sex and the City. Honestly, people
wrote to papers saying things like ‘I don’t understand; Miranda kissed a
girl and didn’t like it!’
Also, part of the initial hysteria was that because the four characters are
seen as saying something about modern American womanhood, somehow my
decision was also saying something about modern American womanhood. Really I
was just saying something about me, but people are so used to thinking of us
as archetypes.”
Indeed, Michael Patrick King, the show’s producer and the writer-director of
the long-awaited movie, believes that the four Sex and the Citycharacters
all represent different aspects of a woman’s personality, allowing viewers
to connect with different characters depending on their mood. “They are all
facets of one person,” he says. “There’s a side who’s very demonstrative and
confident, like Samantha, and then there’s the dreamy Charlotte side, and
then the Miranda character, who’s cerebral and pragmatic. So they all
reflect something that women often wish they were.”
“The storylines were strong, and with the girls, I think people liked that you
see their strengths but you also see their weaknesses,” says Nixon. “Also,
in Candace Bushnell’s book, dating can be very bleak and hard. In a humorous
and, sometimes, a sad way we did show that, but there was always this safety
net, which wasn’t in the book. Here, whatever happens we’re all there for
each other.”
This group bonding is called into play in the new movie. It picks up four
years after the show left off and, while the girls have all built separate
lives, they are reunited for Carrie’s wedding to long-time lover Mr Big
(Chris Noth). Then she suffers heartbreak – the details have not been
released, but it seems that a major character dies.
“Basically, we’re all older when the film starts,” explains Nixon. “Two of us
are married [Miranda and Charlotte], the way that we were at the end of the
show, and now Charlotte has a daughter. Carrie’s with Big, and Sam is with
her guy in LA, and even though we all come together, there’s a thing that
happens when you get older: we all become more wrapped up in our men, our
children and our lives. We’re like four queens in our queendoms and then we
come together to support someone.”
In truth, the film almost didn’t happen at all. It was originally planned for
2004, when the series ended, but Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha, refused
to come on board. She had issues in her personal life – her father developed
dementia, and Cattrall spent more time at home in Canada – and wanted
something approaching fiscal parity with star performer Sarah Jessica
Parker.
The financial wrangling has now been resolved and Nixon is happy with the
outcome. “Honestly, I would say whatever relief I felt when the show
finished was minimal,” she smiles. “For many years we only filmed for three
or four months a year, so it was a dream job. I knew it was coming to an end
and had made my peace with that, but I certainly did miss it.”
Nixon has just started shooting the film Lymelife, alongside Alec
Baldwin and Holly Hunter, and will return to the stage next season in New
York with a production of Distracted.
Is the film the final final curtain for Sex and the City? “I don’t
know,” says Nixon. “We’ve not talked about anything else.” The unspoken
issue is, can the four characters make the leap from small to big screen and
retain the charm that kept audiences hooked. Has their time passed? Or is
there life yet in the bright, shiny Manolos?
Sex and the City is released nationwide on May 28 2008
