KIM Cattrall has been up since 6am, looking out of the window of her Long Island beach cottage and throwing a hopeful gaze in the direction of her kayak.

It’s too windy today to shoot rapids, the actress sighs, so she’s relaxing a little with her cat. And you smile at this titbit because it seems that just as her Sex And The City character Samantha Jones refused to surrender to middle age, Cattrall, a couple of months short of 60, is insatiable, determined to squeeze as much fun out of life as she can.

Yet, the Liverpool-born, Canadian-raised, New York-based actor isn’t about to suggest herself for any upcoming Superwoman movie. Cattrall, since 1998, may have convinced on screen as the supercharged, confident vamp for six series and two films, but she claims that’s not who she is at all. In fact, she is more than happy to reveal her vulnerabilities to the world.

“We really don’t know what life is going to throw at us next,” she says in a soft Woodstock-hippy voice you can’t ever really imagine being raised. “If you expect a certain direction it will kick your ass. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make this series. You see, life is a dance – one step forward and one back – and I wanted to reflect this.”

The series Cattrall is referring to is Sky Arts comedy Sensitive Skin, in which she stars and ex-produces. (Series two began last week.) It’s the story of a woman (Davina) who loses her partner and finds herself groping around a maze. Cattrall loved the premise (based on a BBC TV series starring Joanna Lumley) because it reflected her own life confusions.

“I’m not playing the party girl, the sexy siren. She’s not a game-changer. And I wanted to play a woman who wasn’t the magnet that people would be drawn to. She’s stumbling around trying to figure out what’s going on in her life and this show asks questions. It asks, ‘Who am I going to be for the next 30 years while I’m still ambulatory and still functioning on a level?'”

The British version was more about dealing with grief and moving on, about stoicism, an affirmation to move forward. “Yes, absolutely. Experience makes us very vulnerable and so we armour up, and then get on with it. But I think the North American experience is different, more gradual. And I’m interested in getting beyond the clichés. I really want to explore what it means to be a woman in society, in an honest way. In real life I haven’t lost a partner, I don’t have a son like Davina has. But I do worry about how I will cope with changes that come our way.”

She adds: “I also think the form of half-hour comedies has exploded. It’s no longer set-up/joke. You’ve got to lead the audience, give them the unexpected to contend with, not let them lead you. A TV script like this makes me think about all sorts of possibilities.”

As series two begins, Davina, still mourning her partner, meets a new, compassionate man. They hit it off.

“Where do we go from here?” he asks her.

“We’ve had a glass of wine, we’re walking along the beach,” she replies. “What about the petting zoo?”

He shakes his head and replies: “No, I was talking about your direction in life.”

It’s a nuanced script with many lovely, awkward moments that reflect the main character’s confusion and honesty. Cattrall too has long been honest with the media about her personal issues. For example, when she pulled out of Royal Court Theatre play, Linda, she didn’t simply cite "exhaustion", as actors often do. Instead, she later detailed her problem, chronic insomnia, emerging from rampant insecurity: “Do I deserve what I have?” she would ask herself as she lay, wide-awake in the wee small hours. “Why am I alone?” and “Will I be alone?” Cattrall had lost her father and was plagued with thoughts of her own mortality. Meantime, she was going through the menopause, which she also spoke about at some length.

Does she feel by baring her soul she’s become a role model? “I don’t feel I’ve been baring my soul. I feel I’ve been honest,” she explains. “This experience of being a woman and being human is so complex and I’m just exploring and sharing.”

Yet, she has cleverly used her position as TV sex goddess to applaud the appeal of the older woman. Cattrall wrote a book about sex with her third husband, Mark Levinson. And when she made Star Trek VI, in which she played a Vulcan, it was rumoured that near the end of filming, the actress had a photographer shoot a roll of film on the Enterprise bridge set, in which she wore nothing but her Vulcan ears, supposedly infuriating director Leonard Nimoy.

That story may have emanated from the mythology surrounding her Sex And The City character's persona, but at 52, Kim Cattrall certainly bared virtually all to recreate Titian masterpiece Diana And Actaeon as part of a campaign to keep the original on public display in UK national galleries.

The lady may be sensitive, and fragile. But that’s allied to a boldness, evident when she was just 16 and determined to leave her Canadian one-horse town to attend acting school in New York. The move paid off. Three years later she made her first movie, Otto Preminger’s Rosebud. However, the famous director appears to have treated her like something he should scrape from the sole of his shoe.

“Preminger said many horrible things. [She reminded him of Marilyn Monroe – ‘Not in looks, but in lack of talent’.] He was a bully and he’d pick a new victim every day and I thank god for Isabelle Huppert [her French co-star]. Isabelle knew why he was terrifying and bullied people and that it wasn’t about her, it was about him. And I looked at her and saw how to cope; Monkey see – monkey do.”

Yet, while the strategy allowed Cattrall to make the movie, in retrospect she believes fighting back tears every day is not always the best way to go. “When I was young I felt if I wanted to be successful I had to suit up like a man. I was always reaching for that strength. Now I realise there is more strength in abandoning that. It’s not who I am. I’m embracing the vulnerability. And in doing that I’m coming up with a real strength, which is more about me.”

Cattrall went on to enjoy a successful film career playing the object of teen boys’ lust in the likes of Porky’s and Mannequin. But she continued to work in theatre, to test herself and to make sure casting directors realised there was more to her than the ability to ignite adolescent fuses and send them off like rockets.

She was certainly circumspect in 1997 when offered the role of sex bomb Samantha. In fact, Cattrall turned Sex And The City down three times, believing the sexually free-range cougar character to be too unbelievable, too old. But she came to appreciate that PR executive Samantha Jones was, to an extent, an empowered woman who chose her partners on her own terms.

“I came to think she was a great character but I never wanted to become her,” says Cattrall, grinning. “The consequences of behaving like a character in a half-hour sitcom are far too severe. I always saw her as so much fun, but I wouldn’t want to be her in real life. It must be so exhausting, and all that PR world stuff about knowing who is sleeping with whom bores me rigid.” She adds, laughing: “I prefer to live in the real world.”

In the real world, Cattrall married three times. Even though she loved her husbands, she later realised she’d felt pressured into getting married.

“My 16-year-old self wasn’t that interested in men,” she admits. “I had a boyfriend, but I was a late bloomer and I didn’t see that much of him. For me, the best evening was to have a drink with the people I’d been working with all day in a rehearsal room, doing a great theatre piece. That was my real love affair.

“But when you are younger you’re programmed for it [marriage], unless you are phobic. It’s biological. In fact, from the moment you’re born you’re told Prince Charming is going to come along. But as [Sex And The City character Charlotte] says, ‘Where is he?’ Then when I got close to having children I had to think about my options.

“Now, I’m single and happily so. I’ve had long-term relationships I’ve really enjoyed but I don’t have children and if I want to spend an evening with someone and that goes further then that’s fine.

“And I don’t have any overwhelming needs or desires. The relationship doesn’t make up the whole garment. It seems to be part of this quilt that I’m making but it doesn’t complete my life.”

She adds, grinning: “Oh, gosh, I guess I like women a lot. I feel very much at home in the company of women, more so than the company of men.”

Work, it seems, not relationships, define Kim Cattrall, a woman who has been on a continual journey to prove she can cut the mustard. But these days she’s throttling back, holding off the arduous theatre runs, for example. The Sensitive Skin television series, set on idyllic Toronto island, is demanding enough.

“Time is all important to me now,” she offers. “As I get older, I realise I have the time to relax a bit now, to take a time-out and to fill the bowl with what I choose to.

“You get knowledge of self as you get older. And I’ve learned I want to talk to people. I’m 60 in August and I know quickly if I have common ground with people. I know when I find a like spirit. That’s why I chose to come to Edinburgh, to the Film Festival.”

(Cattrall appeared at the Filmhouse on Thursday, and she is also acting as a juror for the The Michael Powell Award).

"I love Edinburgh," she continues, "and I get to talk about films, which I love and meet some really interesting people.”

Cattrall became starkly aware of the fleeting nature of life when in 1988 she realised she had been booked on the Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie; she had cancelled her booking at the last minute to do some Christmas shopping. The actress then determined to tick as many career boxes as she could.

“I was very busy in my late 40s,” she reflects. “Sex And The City was a train. It was very much like a train, with fascinating stops along the way. And the people I was travelling with were so up for it. So it was really fun. But I wish I’d been able to say to myself, ‘Wow’. I was so close to it I didn’t have any perspective. And everything was set out in front of me, for years in advance. Now, I can do whatever I like, and hopefully meet new, interesting people.”

After the Sex And The City train shunted to a halt, Cattrall, a box office darling, landed the theatre roles she dreamed of, from Arthur Miller’s A View From A Bridge to Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra. Did she embrace any of her characters too readily?

“There are some characters you take on more than others,” she admits. “When I was Cleopatra [Liverpool Playhouse, 2010], that was tough because she orders the world around and then you come home and the cat doesn’t listen to you. You think, ‘OK, that was futile.’”

Cattrall seems pleased with herself these days; not to the point of smugness, but in appreciating what she has achieved. “I look at the theatre school I went to and I’m the only one still standing. The odds are so against you. But now I’m employing other actors.”

Yet, this internationally successful actor would seem to be a great role model for women for a more fundamental reason: she lives to work, but it’s not everything. And she’s prepared to admit she is a work in progress.

Indeed, acknowledging her vulnerability has probably helped make her a better actor. Cattrall, it seems, has control of her life – in the sense that she knows that, ultimately, she’s not in control.

“Oh that’s so true,” she says grinning. “And that’s why I love Sensitive Skin so much. It lets me deal with a lot of issues Kim is dealing with. We need all the help we can get.”

The 70th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until June 26. Kim Cattrall is acting as a juror for The Michael Powell Award.

Series two of Sensitive Skin continues on Sky Arts on Wednesday evenings, 10pm