Kim Victoria Cattrall has always kept a close association
with the city of her birth but her actual spells living in Liverpool have been
brief. She was born on 21st August 1956, the daughter of
construction engineer Dennis Cattrall and his wife (Gladys) Shane (née Baugh).
She is most frequently cited as being born in the Mossley Hill area but the
family home, 15 Claremont Road L15, is actually in Wavertree.
Her family emigrated to British Columbia, Canada when she
was just 3 months old, but she returned for about a year when aged 11,
attending St Edmund’s College. In an interview with the Liverpool Echo
she recalled how much she had wanted to stay in the city, notwithstanding the
fact that her family were thousands of miles away.
Returning to Canada she moved to New York, aged 16, to
pursue an acting career. After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts
she made her film debut in the appalling film Rosebud [1975] directed by
Otto Preminger. Her subsequent film work included starring opposite Jack Lemmon
in Tribute [1980] and the box-office successes Porky’s and Police
Academy. In 1997 she was cast as Samantha Jones in the TV series Sex and
the City a role which would bring her a host of award nominations.
She was a guest on Desert Island Discs in 2004, the
programme is available online at BBC. She also featured on the genealogy
programme Who Do You Think You Are ? which focused on her maternal
grandfather. There are various clips of this available on YouTube.
She was involved in a somewhat bizarre family
feud over the grave of her grandparents in Holy Trinity Church graveyard in Wavertree.
It arose on Christmas Day 2016 when her cousin, Michelle Cox, visited the grave
which was also the resting place of her mother, Edna. She found that the
headstone had been replaced by a new one with two names added. One was Dennis
William, Kim Cattrall’s father who died in 2012, the other being Kim herself,
giving her birth year and the title “The Liverpool Cleopatra” (alluding to her
performance in
Anthony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2010).
There then followed a protracted battle in the ecclesiastical courts as her relatives
sought to have the headstone returned to its original form. Accounts of the
final outcome online seem to vary but a visit to the graveyard shows that the
actresses name and ‘tag line’ are no longer included
