BANFF -- Giving Harrison Ford a run for his money may seem like the kind of brassy, sassy thing Kim Cattrall could easily do in nine-inch-high Manolo Blahnik's with both hands tied behind her back.

But the sexy star of this month's highest grossing film says she couldn't believe that Sex and the City the movie beat Ford's Indiana Jones at the box office.

"I never thought it would be this huge, to beat Indiana Jones, I mean -- that's Hollywood royalty," Cattrall told the Sun in Banff yesterday.

The 51-year-old actress, who plays Samantha on the beloved femme-fuelled TV series and in the movie, was in Alberta for the Banff World Television Festival, where she received the NBC Universal Award of Distinction.

Sex and the City earned $55.7 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canadian theatres its opening weekend, more than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Sex and the City was expected to make around $40 million tops its opening weekend.

"It's classic, that was truly a weekend to remember. I've never gotten so many phone calls from executives on a Sunday morning. It was really exciting," says Cattrall.

She and co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis all reprised their TV roles for the 2008 movie version of the show.

Cattrall says she was happy to be back in Canada (where she grew up) and had plans to head home to the Vancouver area after hob-nobbing at the fest in the Rocky Mountains.

The actress says her favourite part of playing the character over the past decade has been showing a woman of that age (Samantha started as a character in her 40s) can be sexy, vibrant and still complex.

"There never, ever, that I have ever seen, was a character like Samantha on television," says Cattrall. "If so, they were usually two-dimensional and they didn't have a lot of depth or complexity."

Cattrall says personally she's much more conservative than the character she plays on the big screen.

"We look a lot alike and we both like younger men and we like to travel and spend money and we love our girlfriends," says Cattrall, laughing (her current main squeeze is 20 years her junior).

"I'm not near as outrageous, I'm much more Canadian. She's much more bohemian."

Cattrall says before she took on the role of Samantha she had become sick of seeing strong female characters in pop-culture entertainment eventually get "punished" for being sexually free, financially independent and intellectually potent.

"As the series went on her (Samantha's) story line became much more interesting, especially after she got cancer. Those episodes were thrilling to do, but I was nervous about them at first because it felt like some kind of punishment. Any woman who can do what she wants and say what she wants and sleep with who she wants in society is punished. From medieval times she was stoned or they cut her throat, ex-communicated or banished and branded her as a whore," says Cattrall.

"There's always been that throughout history, a woman must pay for that freedom. I felt that giving this character cancer could have taken on this connotation and I was kind of upset -- but the (writers) told me they were going to handle it in a unique way and script after script it just got better. And I was very grateful for that."

Cattrall says what the show has done for women is inspiring, but she hopes young girls will not be allowed to view the episodes or movie.

This is not a show made for an eight-year-old, they don't need to know about this stuff ... I want to say to women, this is not for all women. It's adult entertainment -- it's an R-rated film," says Cattrall.

She says the only time she vetoed a script was when a writer created a story line around Samantha comparing sex tips (fellatio) with a 13-year-old girl.

"I thought, no, stop -- this would never happen unless a woman was insane. And I think that's the only time in the film and TV series that I said, I'm so sorry, but I can't make that work. And they re-wrote it."

The movie star is in the process of producing a pilot for HBO called Sensitive Skin.

"It's based on a series that was done for BBC 2 by a writer/producer/director named Hugo Blick that ... speaks about a woman of a certain age who's dealing with a lot of regret regarding how she lived her life," says Cattrall, adding that she expects the pilot to air this fall.

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