Sarah Jessica Parker: Whatever happened to the real Carrie Bradshaw?

Can the legions of fans of the Channel 4 series Sex and the City cope? A new string of episodes hit the airwaves on Wednesday, and its four female musketeers of between-the-sheets adventure are in a funk. Each faces either post-divorce disappointment, post-betrayal heartbreak, single motherhood or sheer loneliness. And, no question, something is up with Carrie, and it is not just her newly cropped hair.

The wonder of this show, first aired by HBO, the cable channel company, in America in 1998, has been its ability to cater to our raciest urban fantasies. Here were four women – Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte – who should have been drowning in early middle-aged romantic and financial angst but whose lives, instead, were all raunch, thrill and, of course, designer fabulousness. They faced one crisis after another but always overcame them and always had fun. Friendship and libido kept them afloat.

Those who caught that first outing of the fifth series will doubtless have sensed the change of atmosphere. Yes, Carrie, played by the 37-year-old actress Sarah Jessica Parker (known as SJ on set) has had her curls trimmed to the collar. In the hyperventilated world of Sex and the City, this is seen by some as an important event in itself. For four years, women of similar age across the US and Britain have copied their own looks from those of this fictional character. Dressed by Patricia Field, the Manhattan designer, she has become, almost ludicrously, a mannequin for the sophisticated modern dame. When Carrie has chosen a new kind of cocktail to drink, so have millions from Nevada to Newcastle.

Self-appointed sexperts in the city have been busy deconstructing the meaning of the comedy's mood-change. Is it that the old cavortings of the hot-to-trot foursome are starting to look a tad undignified, because first, let's face it, the girls are getting older, and second, their playground, Manhattan, is a different kind of place after the tragedy of 18 months ago? You can only exploit repartee about malfunctioning vibrators, the malodorous effects of farting in bed and fellatio under restaurant tables for so long. Or is the problem really just about Carrie? Or, more accurately, about the woman who plays her?

It's all rather simple, really. Ms Parker, who has been married since May 1997 to fellow actor Matthew Broderick, arrived at the start of filming for this latest series heavily pregnant. This was tiresome for the producers, because it allowed the light of the real world to seep in. Writing another baby into the show – single-mother Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, has already introduced one tiny tot to the script – was dismissed as unpractical. So they had to adapt. Instead of the normal 13 episodes, the number was cut to eight to accommodate Ms Parker's approach to delivery. Worse, every trick had to be pulled to disguise the balloon of her expanding tummy. "You've heard of smoke and mirrors," remarked producer Michael Patrick King. "Well, our version was Birkin bags and hat boxes. If the show had gone on another day, I believe Carrie would have appeared wearing a 4-foot flower pinned to her dress."

Ms Parker has, you understand, become one of the most famous and gossiped-about celebrities on the planet. That has been thanks, largely, to the success of this programme, even though her acting career in film, television and on stage stretches back nearly 25 years (yes, she was a successful child star). Her marriage to Mr Broderick, another Hollywood fixture, hardly helps. Thus, the illusion of her character – she plays Carrie Bradshaw, a romance columnist for a New York paper, based on the real-life writer Candace Bushnell – may have finally been blown. And the more you know about Sarah Jessica, the more you realise how quite unlike Carrie Bradshaw she actually is. She is, for instance, a giant prude.

Ms Parker was not to the glamorous life born, and the humble circumstances of her childhood still inform how she lives now. Unlike Carrie, she does not have a wardrobe in the brownstone house she shares with Broderick in the West Village, crammed with 1,000 Manolo shoes. In fact, she has about half a dozen, she recently revealed. She has nice things, but never splurges in the shops. "I buy cheap because that's what my mother did," she said in one interview. She frets that her career might come to a crashing end at any moment. Nor has she ever thought of herself as particularly pretty. Never mind that she has a smile so wide and engrossing it could swallow almost any man's heart.

Her life began in Nelsonville, a gritty coal-mining town in Ohio, in March 1965. Within a year, her father, Stephen Parker, an aspiring writer, divorced his wife Barbara, with whom he had had four children. Barbara, a nursery school teacher and theatre enthusiast, soon met and married another man, Paul Forste, a student and lorry driver, with whom she had four more children. With eight mouths to feed, she was perennially strapped for money. Sarah Jessica has recalled how some years Christmas simply never happened, such was the family's penury. She is still haunted by the memory of having to go the front of class at the Clifton School, in Cincinnati, at the age of eight to ask the teacher for a free-lunch coupon. "I remember my childhood as Dickensian. I remember being poor. There was no way to hide it. We did not have electricity sometimes."

But it was her mother's dedication to drama – and to her children – that saved the family. The lack of money notwithstanding, Sarah Jessica was sent to ballet classes every week. Nearly all her siblings are engaged now in the theatre in one way or another. As for Sarah Jessica, at just eight she landed a role in an NBC TV special, The Little Match Girl. Two years later, she went to Broadway to play opposite Claire Bloom in Harold Pinter's The Innocents. Soon after, she was cast as one of the orphans in the original New York production of the musical Annie, and from 1978 she took the lead role for two years. Her mother, meanwhile, had moved the family to New York, and Sarah Jessica's path to stardom was already mapped out.

Theatre is still the medium that matters most to the star and provides her with professional discipline, even though it is the large and the small screen that have bought her most fame. "In the theatre, you're not scrutinised to the degree that you are in television or film," she told one interviewer. "You're not being paid an exorbitant, obscene amount of money. You're not being waited on hand and foot. Cute and precocious behaviour is not coddled and nurtured. It's primarily about the work." Recent outings have been in such Broadway productions as How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1996) alongside Broderick and as the star in the off-Broadway show Wonder of the World (2001).

Critics always note the ease with which Parker slides between stage and film roles. She does, indeed, have a very long portfolio of Hollywood appearances, although to date she has been cast almost always in supporting roles. While she has Golden Globe nominations aplenty, she is not on the celluloid pantheon alongside such female talents as Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman or Julianne Moore. Oscar is yet to come calling. She was a nasty mistress in The First Wives Club and found her head attached to a dog's body in Mars Attacks. Earlier films that gave her work included Footloose, Flight of the Navigator and, more memorably, LA Story, which saw her portraying SanDeE opposite Steve Martin.

Her professional life has been one almost without bumps, despite a few early television shows that won critical acclaim only to be quickly ditched by the networks concerned. It is also one of rags to riches. Her personal progression has been more turbulent, however. For seven years, she lived with the actor Robert Downey Jr, only to run away from him and, more particularly, from his deepening drug addictions.

Later she had shorter relationships with the likes of Nicolas Cage (with whom she co-starred in Honeymoon in Vegas) and even John F Kennedy Jr. Her life settled (most un-Carrie like) in 1992 when she met Broderick in New York. They began dating almost at once. Broderick, 40, and Parker have led almost uncannily similar professional lives, both of them wedded equally to the screen and the stage. They are both short (she is 5ft 4in) and they both ached for years to start a family.

Broderick, more than Parker, has always craved privacy. This yearning may have been partly forged by the terrible tragedy of a car accident he suffered in Northern Ireland in 1988. He was driving a girlfriend in a rented car when he ran head on into a car. Both the other car's occupants, a 60-year-old woman and her 28-year-old daughter, were killed. "You never get over it," Broderick once confessed.

There was a brief period a year ago when New York's gossips were hawking tales of marital strife. These were fed partly by Parker's failure to mention Broderick during a Golden Globes nomination event. Then, last March, came the news that Parker was with child. No mother to be could have expected more tabloid attention for her medical condition, aside, perhaps, from a Japanese emperor's daughter. All talk of marital stress dissolved, as did Broderick's hopes of a quiet private life. James Wilke Broderick was born on 28 October last year. The press cheered. But what are Carrie's fans to make of it?

For one, try not to spend the entire new series peering deep into the screen for accidental shots of her no longer runway-flat belly. The time has come to remind ourselves that Sex and the City really is fiction, and often pretty superficially silly fiction at that. But we can still enjoy it, for what is – escapist, often hilarious, sexually-charged comedy – even if SJ isn't really Carrie at all. And don't worry, the next few episodes, which we enjoyed in America last autumn, do lighten up a bit.

As a new mother, Sarah Jessica has allowed herself a few indulgences that better fit her character in the show than her own humble roots. We hear that in time for baby's arrival, she acquired a $2,100 (£1,300) Silver Stream pram from the British company that gave wheels to Prince Charles when he was in nappies. How did she come even to see such a Rolls-Royce of a baby carriage? Why, on the set of Sex and the City, of course.

Life story

Born

Nelsonville, Ohio, 25 March 1965, to Stephen, an aspiring writer, and Barbara, a teacher. Sarah was the youngest of four children. Her father left when she was two, and her mother remarried Paul Forste, a trucker.

Family

Married Matthew Broderick, an actor, in 1997; they have one child, James, born 28 October 2002.

Broadway career

At 10, she featured in The Innocents; at13, Sarah was the third Annie in the Broadway production; Recently she starred alongside Matthew Broderick in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

Television career

Began her career in a TV special of The Little Match Girl when she was eight; At 16, she became a regular on the sitcom Square Pegs; she has played the writer Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City since 1998.

Films

Footloose (1984); LA Story (1991); Honeymoon in Vegas (1992); The First Wives Club (1996); State and Main (2000).

She says

"I feel I could knit and earn a living in Ireland."

"I tell my friends married life is boring, but that's just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better."

They say

"She's one of my miracle workers in America" – Manolo Blahnik, shoe designer.

"I know her family's going to be the most important thing for her" – her brother Timothy.