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NEW YORK -- Kristin Davis is bright and beautiful and living proof that success is a double-edged sword.
TV success, anyway.
Davis, 41, currently co-stars with Tim Allen in The Shaggy Dog, which opens Friday, but Sex And The City is still the only thing anybody wants to ask her about. For those who've been living on another planet, the HBO show ran from 1998 to 2004 and won an avalanche of Golden Globes, Emmys and other awards. There was supposed to be a film based on the TV show, but it never happened.
Just last week, Davis' Sex And The City co-star Sarah Jessica Parker said that everyone had agreed to do a Sex And The City film ... except Kim Cattrall.
"Oh, geez -- I can't believe we're starting this way!" says Davis, laughing, as the Kim Cattrall comment is lobbed her way. Yes, Davis concedes, Cattrall is the reason no movie will be made from the TV show.
"But Kim said that herself," she says, kindly.
Still, the actress admits that ending Sex And The City was a tough go. And at the time, they all believed a movie would follow.
"There were numerous pictures of us sobbing in the papers, which isn't really something you want to see of yourself. I think had we really known the truth, that we weren't going to make the movie, I think we would all have gone to bed and not got up again."
It was a worrisome experience for any actor.
"On a bad day, at that time, I thought I'd never work again," Davis says. "We were paid well for the show, so it wasn't a monetary concern. It's mostly that work is a drug. You wouldn't do the crazy things we all do if you weren't addicted to the experience," she says, cheerfully.
"You miss that, it's strange, it's like detox."
Davis was raised in South Carolina. She does that whole bubbly, southern belle thing in conversation, but there are always hints of an iron will and a big intellect just under that surface. She is the only child of a professor of psychology and admits that her career choice left her parents, "Dismayed."
She adds, "But just for a moment. My parents are great. When I was young, they felt I should be a well-rounded child, in the renaissance way. So I took piano, violin, flute, dance and I was sent to the theatre. I didn't want to go to the theatre. I was shy and didn't want to get on the stage, but I went when I was about 9 or 10 and I loved it."
Her parents thought it was a nice hobby, but in time, all the music disappeared and the acting continued.
After graduating from Rutgers University, Davis lived in New York, acting and waitressing. She eventually opened a yoga studio with a friend. Davis got TV work and in 1987 appeared in a B-movie horror outing called Doom Asylum. Despite a passion for acting she recognized by the age of 10, she was 30 years old before she became a household name courtesy of TV's Melrose Place.
She has fond memories of working with Heather Locklear on that show, and fond memories of the swimming pool.
"That pool was like a centrepiece and we'd spend all day at the pool and they kept the water at about 100 degrees because nobody on the show had any body fat," she says. "Except for me."
Davis' work since Sex And The City has included such films as The Adventures Of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D and The Shaggy Dog, and she's the voice of Miss Spider on the Nickelodeon animated series Miss Sider's Sunny Patch Friends. It's all sort of family-oriented, but she says there was no plan for things to go that way.
The mere mention of 'family' movies brings up Sex And The City all over again -- because Davis' character on the show, Charlotte, had fertility problems and was childless. In real life, Davis is unmarried and as yet has no children. That's a regret. All her friends have kids, she says, "and my friends from South Carolina have like, three kids each!"
Of having her own children, she says, "I think about it all the time. I don't know what I'm going to do. I would potentially be a single mother." Joking again, she adds, "I think it would be challenging to do the pregnancy by myself and have all of you asking me all the time who the father is."
In the near future, Davis is on her way to London to make her West End theatre debut in The Exonerated. Recently, she worked hard putting together a new HBO series and though it's now on the back burner, she remains hopeful that it might still happen.
Somehow that leads us all back to Sex And The City and that movie that never got made, and Davis is asked what Charlotte's fate was in the end. Did she, in fact, finally get a baby?
"She did," says Davis, wistfully. "She adopts a baby. She goes to China. And so much more."
Career gone to the dogs
The Shaggy Dog is a combo remake of two Disney movies: The Shaggy Dog (1959) and The Shaggy D.A. (1976).
There's plenty of cute dog action in the film and that suits Davis perfectly, as she is a self-described 'dog person'.
The actress recently took in a whole family of dogs to foster, mixed-breed pups from an animal shelter in L.A.
She's not sure how she'll be able to give them up again.
"I might just keep the brood," she says. "It's a long story and I'm not the letting-go type, so I don't know what I was thinking," she says, laughing.
Asked what the pups are called, Davis raises one eyebrow. "I didn't name them -- they were already named. Want to guess what the names are?" she asks.
Read it and weep: The mother dog is Charlotte. The puppies are Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Mr. Big.
But you already knew that.