Performing at the Liverpool Playhouse next month will be like returning home, Kim Cattrall tells Laura Davis

KIM CATTRALL clearly remembers her first sniff of cold cream.

She was 11 years old, backstage after her first theatrical performance in an amateur dramatics version of Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The pot was handed to her by her great-aunt Mai – am dram enthusiast, elocution instructor, nursery teacher and talented watercolourist.

“I remember liking the smell of the cold cream on my face,” recalls the Sex and the City star.

“Even when I smell it today, I think about the first time that I was taking my bits of make-up off. For me it represented a lot more than acting. It was a different kind of life.”

Cattrall was just a few months old when she left Liverpool, her birthplace, for rural Canada – and aged 11 when she returned for a single, wonderful year.

For a girl used to living on the outskirts of the tiny village of Little River – population 500, with no theatre and an unreliable television set with just two channels –late-60s Liverpool was a revelation.

And who better to introduce her to the bright lights than Mai Bradbury, with whom Cattrall stayed in her home near Childwall Fiveways.

“I’d only really seen school plays and a touring company once, which so excited me, much more than sports or boys or anything else my friends were interested in,” explains the Hollywood actor, who is returning to Liverpool next month for a five-week run of Antony and Cleopatra at the Playhouse.

“It was quite a transition going from rural life to this urban existence of so much around me. So it was a very exciting time in my life and my association with Liverpool was always about culture and the arts and family.”