Sarah Jessica Parker

For lots of people, Sarah Jessica Parker pretty much is her best-known character: Carrie Bradshaw. But over a dozen years after she first starred on Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker has moved on. Last year she helped launch a new reality TV series – in fact, the first reality show – about making fine art. The winner of the first season’s competition, an art teacher from Pennsylvania, got an exhibit in a major New York City art museum. Work of Art is now in its second season on Bravo. Parker told Kurt Andersen how she dreamed up the show: “My husband’s mother was a great painter, and she didn’t have the great success that I felt she should have.”
Parker also tells Kurt about about her early roles as little orphan Annie on Broadway and a frizzy-haired teenager on Square Pegs. How much of the fictional Carrie is in the real Sarah Jessica? “Thirty percent,” she says.
(Originally aired: May 28, 2010)