The former Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall has spoken of her struggle with the “tsunami” of chronic insomnia that forced her out of a starring role on the London stage.
Cattrall, who had been due to take the title role in the Royal Court theatre’s production of Penelope Skinner’s play Linda last year, said she withdrew on the advice of doctors and for the sake of her sanity.
She described the insomnia, which meant she had not slept for 48 hours when she returned to the US from the UK, as a “gorilla sitting on my chest”.
“I didn’t understand the debilitating consequence of having no sleep. It becomes a tsunami. I was in a void,” Cattrall told the new issue of Radio Times. “I didn’t want to let down the audience, the theatre, playwright or the actors.
“Letting go of all that was the hardest part but I realised the work that I really needed to do was more important than the play – it was work or my sanity.”
The actor, who was born in Liverpool but moved to Canada as a baby, had been due to star as Linda, a businesswoman who vows revenge after her office affair goes viral.
She was replaced with two weeks to go by Olivier award winner Noma Dumezweni, who the Guardian said was a “knockout” in the play about the invisibility of older women.
Cattrall said she did not listen to the “noise” of criticism on social media after she dropped out of the role. “I have my own voice on social media, where I can say: ‘If you’re interested in what really happened, the whole story is more complex than being disease of the week’, than someone saying, ‘I have this battle’,” she said.
“Coming back to the US, I hadn’t slept for 48 hours and had to wait six hours to get my 18-year-old cat through customs. When the customers officer said: ‘So how much is your cat worth?’ I couldn’t stop laughing hysterically.”
Cattrall said she had “sacrificed a lot of her personal life and relationships because of her love of work. But I’m not a one-off; there are lots of women like me out there.
“Our mothers went through the Great Depression and world war; we feel we can’t let anybody down. Because everyone would point to it, like they do with Hillary Clinton and say, ‘Oh she’s crying today’.”
The actor said she had tried cognitive behaviour therapy to help cope with insomnia. “It’s like putting on a pair of sneakers and going into your past to get a new perspective. And I was gentle with myself. So last Christmas wasn’t about friends and relations; it was a monastic experience of trying to delve.”
Cattrall touched on the issue in an interview with Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in April, when she said she had previously blamed her sleeplessness on “jetlag … too much tea or another stage of menopause”.
She became worried when she continued to lie awake at night and found it difficult to “hold on to ideas, thoughts, even tasks”.
