The biggest surprise for Sarah Jessica Parker is the number of strangers who think she is like Carrie and want to discuss their sex lives with her. Steve Pratt reports.

SARAH Jessica Parker is keen to point out that she's not at all like Carrie, the fashion icon she plays in TV's and now the big screen's Sex And The City.

She wants you to know she's really a happily-married mother with a son she adores and is as likely to be found in the latest New York hotspot as Carrie would be changing nappies. The public has been known to confuse Carrie and the actress, treating her like some kind of sex therapist. Strangers would come up to her, revealing candid details of their lives in the hopes she'd offer them a few words of wisdom. "When the show first aired people would be not unkindly confrontational, but they would be very frank and candid, and just tell me very personal and intimate details of their lives," she says.

"Really men and women, honestly. But people weaned themselves off that need and more so now they're just approaching it in a general, convivial way. It's not my nature to be that way - of all the women I'm the least candid and forthright about that kind of thing. So it's very surprising, but I understood why.

"I think it's true of television, it creates an intimacy very quickly for people. It's in their homes and they establish relationships and I knew that this show was connecting with an audience. Even then, I understood that this was the first time there was that voice and that women were responding to it."

The movie has been much mooted, but a long time coming, amid stories - denied by all - that the four main actresses have been arguing over money and billing. Parker was instrumental in getting the movie made as a producer, finding it a huge thrill to be reunited with director-writer Michael Patrick King, costume designer Pat Fields and fellow actors Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kirstin Davis.

The 43-year-old actress began work on putting the film together in spring 2006, finally getting in front of the camera last September, some four years after the TV series ended. For Carrie, the film invests more time in her relationship - and marriage perhaps? - with Mr Big as well as her friendships and career.

Parker doesn't worry that the character has ever been perceived by the audience as a fashionista, as a superficial character. "I don't have that fear," she says. "Sometimes I wonder if people confuse me (with her) and that that is the most important part of my life. But these are things that come along with having played that character. There's obviously a lot of sustenance to Carrie Bradshaw and I realise that a great part of her loves fashion and has a great relationship with clothes, but it's not really the sum of who she is.

"If that had been the case, I don't think that novelty could keep a show on the air for that long, it has to be more of an emotional investment."

SHE'S not about to predict if the film will lead to a series of cinema outings for Sex And The City. "It would be putting the cart before the horse to talk about another. I mean, I've produced movies and this isn't the first, and hopefully won't be the last," she says.

"This is the biggest thing I've been a part of producing, just in terms of the effort and what's at stake, but I don't know about another Sex And The City movie. But I definitely loved producing it."

Sex And The City is about the friendship of four women and in her own life Parker has strong friendships going back 15, 20, even 30 years. "I come from a very big family, I'm one of eight children and so a lot of my siblings are my friends. It's hard to illustrate with one story what a friendship, or what one friend has done for me, but my friends are everything to me and I hope that I'm the kind of friend to them that they are to me."

To a large section of the audience, she's a fashion icon. She originally worked with costume designer Patricia Field on another movie, Miami Rhapsody. Parker wasn't able to get Field on the pilot for Sex And The City, but wooed her for the series to play a key role in dressing her.

"I always say that Pat's work on the show was as important as the storytelling in many ways because fashion was part of the story, but also because she's very good at telling a story with the fashion. She really thinks about it, she has a great sense of fashion historically."

One thing Parker learnt is that the rules should be thrown out of the window. "By doing that you take great risks and people make fun of certain things. The hits are enormous and the misses are comical.

"I've learnt an enormous amount from her and really this idea that I'm some kind of fashion icon is, in large part, due to Pat."

Parker thinks about shopping, but it fits into her life in a different way than for Carrie. "I have a child and so any free time I have, if I'd spent that running all the way uptown to a clothing store, I'd just feel crappy about it. It just doesn't fit into my life in the same way.

"It doesn't mean I have any less affection, I just don't have that kind of disposable time. It doesn't mean I don't look through fashion magazines and dog-ear a page and think I've got to get that shoe or that bag'. I like it and I think about it, but it's kind of a flight of fancy."

Married to actor Matthew Broderick, she says that her son comes first. If he's not content and well taken care of, everything else doesn't have the same meaning.

"Everything works if he's all right. If he's not, or I'm feeling worried that he's not getting the attention he needs, then everything else doesn't get the same balance. But that's the nature of being a mother, if you want to be a working mother, you are constantly in a state, you're straddling this world of guilt. It's just the nature of being a working mother.

"But the truth is that's my fault because I like to be a working person and I like to think that makes me a better parent."

* Sex And The City (15) is now showing in cinemas.