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"You can never really be in the driver's seat because of fate," the actress was musing yesterday on the phone from L.A.
"But I'm making choices that I think fit me better than a sort of pie-in-the-sky plan that I thought I should follow. I feel good about that."
Cattrall does seem to have found contentment in her career and her personal life. And, for a change, not in that order. Which is why she has few second thoughts about turning down work that would take her very far or keep her very long apart from her fiance, actor Daniel Benzali, who was the first-season star of the TV series Murder One and is currently on screen in the movie Murder At 1600. He's doing likewise.
The pair met on a blind date set up by a friend who thought their mutual love of jazz, theatre and books would make them a good match. They plan to marry this summer.
"There are a lot of challenges to being in a relationship with someone who does what we do. That can bring you together but it can also pull you apart," says Cattrall, who has two marriages behind her from when her focus was foremost on her career.
She and Benzali appeared in an episode of The Outer Limits last year in which she played a woman pregnant with a baby with "alien qualities."
In the miniseries Robin Cook's Invasion, airing Sunday and Monday nights on NBC and ONTV, Cattrall is all-human, cast as a doctor looking for the cure to a virus from outer space.
"I sort of save the world. Small task," she laughs.
"This is not a think tank kind of miniseries," she says.
"This is like an E-ride at Disneyland. There's nothing thought-provoking, not a lot of substance to it. It's just fun."
Getting older has turned out to be fun for Cattrall, who finds herself less often cast for glamor than in a past that has included star parts in Mannequin, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, Bonfire Of The Vanities, and, who can forget, as a whoofing and whoopingly orgasmic gym teacher in Porky's.
"I like not feeling like a prop," she says, vividly recalling arriving in Hollywood as a skinny tomboy from Vancouver Island and being ordered to lose weight, grow her hair and take makeup and wardrobe classes.
"For me, it's something that I've always thought of as, ' How much longer does this have to go on?' as far as that kind of pretty department stuff."
As for Porky's, for which she retains a great affection, Cattrall was pleased when The New York Times recently revisted the movie and rated it three stars.
"It's a classic for its genre. It wasn't American Graffiti. It went over barriers that American Graffiti had set -- maybe taste barriers, some people say -- but I think it made some kind of impact. I had a great time doing it."
She's just finished filming the comedy Baby Geniuses with Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd, a Christmas movie about kids raised in a research centre.
When she was offered an HBO series recently, she turned it down because she would have had to move to New York and make a multi-year commitment. That would have taken her away from her twice-a-week women's writing group where she's working on short stories and polishing a script for the short film she wants to direct. And it would have taken her too far from Benzali.
"The next five years are really important to me," she says.
"Getting married and having a baby right now ARE more important to me than having my own sitcom."