In theory, being a wizened old sexagenarian, I should feel resentful of gorgeous young women, particularly those who have monetised their erotic capital in a way I could never have dreamt of, even at my fruitiest. But on the contrary, they make me feel like cheering; I’m particularly keen on Sydney Sweeney and her fantastic rack. There is, however, one famous actress who really gets my goat; I feel an almost physical reaction when I see her photograph. Sometimes, in restaurants, when they say ‘Any allergies?’ I want to reply ‘Yes – Sarah Jessica Parker.’
On paper, I should love SJP. (It pains me to be so familiar with someone I loathe, but I resent the time it takes to type out her full name.) In an entertainment industry colonised by the privileged, she is from a blue-collar family of eight children. In an age of when Hollywood often appears twinned with Ramallah, she identifies as Jewish, though it’s her father rather than her mother who was of the blood, so extra points for volunteering. But my antipathy towards her is so strong that it overrides these two of my strongest favour-biases.
I was never a fan of Sex And The City, partly because I admired the excellent Candace Bushnell columns for the New York Observer which it was loosely based on and was dismayed that the mordant wit which had made them famous had been replaced by a heinous hybrid of vulgarity and sentiment. As Carrie Bradshaw, SJP had only two speeds; grotesque wink-winkery whenever S.E.X hoves into view and the kind of sugar-sweetness which makes one want to murder a household pet in front of her to wipe that smug simper off her face.
Though I know in theory we feminist man-haters aren’t in favour of women being judged on their looks, I’m going to make an exception here. (Though to be fair I’d say the same thing about an unattractive man being cast as the lubricious lynchpin of a sex-drama.) Her face – elsewhere likened to a foot – always made me think of a pensive miniature pony, and her overall ‘style’ of dress of that same pony which a vicious child playing dress-up had tried to make a laughing stock of. The character of ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ is one of the most monstrous bores of all time, making this into a meta-monotony by virtue of the fact that she writes a column about herself. It’s all very well being self-centred if you’re fascinating, but no one could mistake this size zero for an outsize personality.
On paper, I should love SJP
It’s not just me; a younger friend became obsessed with the show even though she was ten-years-old when it started; ‘She drove me so mad I had to squint sometimes when looking at the TV. I loved everything else about the show so much – it was just her.’ It’s likely that most people who liked the show were drawn by the warmth of Parker’s co-star Kim Cattrall, who despite the pantomime sex-vamp constrictions of her character was everything that Parker wasn’t: an adult in every way that makes the word so alluring to the young and restless. You could sense Cattrall’s depth and desperation beneath the gay man’s caricature of a vagina dentata; a working-class girl from Liverpool, she made it in Hollywood in films like Mannequin (a shop-window dummy comes to life) because she was a pretty young thing and has spent a lifetime proving herself otherwise. Since leaving SATC she has since been excellent in roles as disparate as Miss Julie onstage and the CIA officer Eloise Page on Radio 4’s Central Intelligence.
Even in the shockingly bad Sex And The City films (‘Carry On Chlamydia’) Cattrall manages to be likeable. But you can almost sense her embarrassment at being a mature woman acting in films which appear to have been scripted by a self-abusing teenage boy; Mark Kermode called Sex And The City 2 ‘morally repugnant’ and that’s putting it mildly. Thankfully a third abomination was mercifully swerved, with Cattrall blamed for ‘outrageous demands’ to which she answered smartly, ‘The only demand I made was that I didn’t want to do a third film’, before taking off to London to do theatre.
Parker, on the other hand, showed no embarrassment at the degraded entertainments she was the main face of, saying of the stymied third SATC film ‘We had this beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, joyful, very relatable script and story. It’s not just disappointing that we don’t get to tell the story and have that experience, but more so for the audience that has been so vocal in wanting another movie.’ (If this is true, then ‘the audience’ were indulging in the cultural equivalent of self-harming.)
In 2021 And Just Like That reunited the SATC gang (minus Cattrall, who had a humdinger of a social media ding-dong with SJP, calling her ‘cruel…you are not my friend’) but Parker’s portrayal of Bradshaw now seemed more Baby Jane than Broadway Baby. (The acid-tongued American critic Maureen Callahan calls her ‘the world’s sprightliest 90-year-old woman’.) It was a DEI scold-fest in which, as the Radio Times wrote, ‘The newfound social and cultural awareness is shoe-horned into such a degree the whole endeavour feels often cloying’ and which offended even those it sought to suck up to, Kristin Corry of Vice opining ‘The reboot wants to undo its colour-blind legacy by including black characters – unfortunately, they’re treated as luxury accessories.’ It was cancelled after three seasons in 2025; not so much a glorious finale as a public mercy killing. ‘I’ve been crucified!’ was the Guardian headline in an interview with her.
Of course, like many actors, she has had a number of ‘side hustles’ – a phrase which, when used by already extremely wealthy people (SJP is thought to be worth around $200 million and once owned a five-storey townhouse solely to store her vast collection of clothing) – is a way of making greed seem young and funky. Parker has peddled – deep breath – a line of shoes, a line of wine, a line of jewellery (featuring a diamond necklace for £70,000), more than 20 perfumes (called things like Lovely, SJP NYC and Born Lovely) and because time catches up with us all, a line of eye drops (VIZZ) especially aimed at we old folk to help reduce our reliance on reading glasses.
But more than anything, Parker shills herself as an intellectual. She’s not very good at it; her commencement speech at Northwestern University this summer was singled out by many mockers as a masterpiece of solipsism. ‘There have been many attempts to change me…and I have resisted’ she swore solemnly, perhaps not comprehending that deciding against a nose job is not quite the same as being Joan of Arc. Above all, who could doubt the depths of a money-mad actress if they love books? Our humble heroine was even ‘Editorial Director’ of her own imprint, ‘SJP For Hogarth’, launched in 2016, which she mutated into an independent imprint called ‘SJP Lit’ in 2023. In a 2024 Spectator piece Alexander Larman noted the jarring contradiction of a private-jet lifestyle with a struggling craft. She’s in Vogue this month writing about her favourite things, flogging a £5000 diamond ring from her jewellery line and claiming that her biggest vice is ‘Books, books, books.’
Maybe it’s just me, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether there’s something objectionable about using books as your ‘thing’ when you’ve become rich and famous shrieking about shoes and encouraging young women in their millions to believe that they are the key to happiness. Books can save a life, unlike shoes – though come to think of it ‘The Shoes That Saved My Life’ sounds like a SATC episode. With the recent death of Dolly Parton, we were reminded of her Imagination Library, which was responsible for giving millions of children worldwide free books in their formative years; this, I’d venture, was the act of a woman who truly believed in the transformative power of reading. ln comparison, Parker’s prattling about it seems simply like another performative grift in the ever-evolving ghastliness of this profoundly boring blot on the cultural landscape.
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