SPILLING 'SEX AND THE CITY SECRETS ON UK TOUR CANDACE BUSHNELL ON DATING AFTER DIVORCE, AGEING WITH GRACE AND THE SEX THAT INSPIRED THE SHOW

'Women over 50 are the hottest new dating demographic'

-  ROSALIND POWELL

Candace Bushnell has had an intense love affair with New York since she moved there from Connecticut in the 1970s with just $20 in her pocket. So it’s perhaps surprising to find her in full relaxed mode at her bijou cottage in The Hamptons, her second home in the affluent Long Island seaside escape for city dwellers.

However, the best-selling author and real-life Carrie Bradshaw, whose newspaper column inspired the hit TV series Sex and the City, is hunkering down ahead of a UK tour of her one-woman show, True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.

The production, which she wrote and first performed in the US in 2021, is the “origin story” of the cult drama, describing how she got there “and what happened to me afterwards”, she says. “With a couple of naughty sex stories thrown in for good measure.”

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At one point she plays a game with the audience, asking them which scenes in the original TV series, which ran from 1999 to 2004 and spawned a blockbuster film franchise and a recent reboot in the shape of And Just Like That…, happened to her in real life.

“A few of them have to do with men Carrie dated, and whether or not I dated similar men,” she says. One of them happened to be a Calvin Klein model. “Well, I didn’t really date him,” says Candace, 65, with a wry smile. But you had intimate relations? “Yes, but I don’t want to give too much away.”

The tour takes her around the UK – including “Edinbro? Edinberg?” she says, tussling with the quirks of the English language – but the highlight will be a night at the London Palladium next week.