Hello, I'm Kesti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2004 and the presenter was Sue Lolli.

My cast away this week is an actress. The television role which has made her famous is the epitome of female emancipation.

As the PR mogul Samantha Jones in the American series Sex in the City, she's romped her way to celebrity status through her characters immense appetite for sex and liberal attitude towards it.

The actress herself originally turned down the part but six series later is now at the very top of her profession.

She played her first film role for Otto Preminger when she was 17, had starring roles in the comedy film's Porkies and Police Academy and among many serious stage roles played opposite Ian McKellen in the Broadway production of Chekhov's Wild Honey.

And she's about to star in a new production of Brian Clocks whose life is it anyway in the West End of London.

Of the part that's made her famous she says, I don't think there's ever been a woman on television who's expressed so much sexual joy without being punished.

She is Kim Katrol. She's a great character, Kim Samantha Jones, a free spirit. She really has touched a nerve with people, hasn't she?

Oh, she really has. She's touched a nerve in me playing her for the past seven years.

People, especially women, have been reaching out to me since it started airing. Oh my God, that happened to me or I wish that would happen to me or I want to be you, you know, in my next life.

I am you, not knowing at all who I am, but we should make it. Well, quite and there is obviously a confusion between the real you, Kim and Samantha, which will come to.

But the fascinating thing about it is in case people don't know about Samantha. I mean, not only is she pretty promiscuous, but she tries lesbianism.

She tries to seduce a Roman Catholic priest. I mean, is this what women in the street are saying to you? I would really do all these things.

I think I don't know if they'd like to do them, but we all have those fantasies and this character was living them out for all of us, being included.

But on any given week when I would get a script, I would be absolutely terrified because I thought, how am I going to do this?

And I thought, how am I, first of all, going to make this truthful? How am I going to make it funny? And are people going to be turned off?

Because it was so outrageous. I mean, dying, a character dying her pubic hair, you know, brown, and then it comes out bozo red.

I mean, how do you, how do you do emotional recall on something like that? But the important thing is what I quoted you as saying, isn't it?

That she can be promiscuous. You can do all sorts of crazy things, but she is not punished. She is not judged. That's what made her a 21st century character, isn't it?

Absolutely. You know, I think the word promiscuity, you know, it just hearing you say it, it conjures up really negative connotations.

It's a judgment. It is a judgment. And I think that that was the one thing that this character had was she had no judgment of anything.

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