As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sex and the City and the release of the second season of And Just Like That, I can’t help but think about Amalita Amalfi, my all-time favourite character, and the star of the show’s best episode, “The Power of Female Sex”. In the episode – directed by Susan Seidelman, who also did the show’s pilot and previously brought us Desperately Seeking Susan, The Smithereens and She-Devil – we are introduced to Amalita, who swoops in to save Carrie’s day as she is attempting to buy a pair of feathery Dolce & Gabbana sandals.
We hear her voice – sweet and sugary with a thick European accent (“I’m a citizen of the world!” she tells Carrie at one point) – before we see her: long jet black Cher-esque hair and red lips that are always smiling. Her outfits read rich – but never quiet. She wears dresses that are form fitting, and often involve a matching jacket or cardigan; her accessory of choice, aside from a Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet (“$12,000,” she growls at Carrie), is a very chic black cigarette holder. Amalita introduces Carrie to a very handsome French architect who leaves $1,000 in cash in an envelope after their evening together.
The implication is that Amalita is a professional girlfriend. (Miranda calls her “a hooker with a passport,” while Samantha, ever the sex-positive icon states: “Money is power. Sex is power. Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” Miranda, in maybe one of the best lines in the show, responds in turn: “Don’t listen to the dime store Camille Paglia!” But I digress.) Despite whatever the girls may think about Amalita, the fact remains that she is an almost universally beloved character. While everyone’s been cheering the return of Aidan (which, why?) some of us have been begging for only one thing: for the show to bring back Amalita.
“Thank you so much for remembering Amalita!” I am on the phone with Carole Davis, the actress who played the role 25 years ago. She speaks with an American accent which is somewhat unnerving. “I am ‘doing’ my mother and my grandfather, that’s why it comes so naturally,” she explains. She was born in London and lived there for some time before moving to Paris, Bangkok, New York, France and Italy, before eventually settling in Los Angeles “for showbiz”. (Much like Amalita, Davis is also a citizen of the world, darling.)
AJLT seeks to correct many of the perceived wrongs of the original show, and aims to expand its point of view; bringing back Amalita would certainly make sense. So what if her main source of income was (probably) her many European boyfriends? Charlotte got her Park Avenue apartment after being married to Trey for barely a year! “Amalita has been so maligned,” Davis says. “She was just a very social, very positive, fun-loving woman.”
“The fans keep writing to me saying, ‘When are you coming back?’ as if I had the power to snap my fingers and just” – and here Davis slips into the Amalita voice – “wave, darling wave!” She continues, “If I could come back it would be so fabulous, but no one has made the call, and I’m not a pushy person.” It’s not like she’s been sitting around waiting; Davis has had an incredible life and career. Living in New York City in the 1980s she ran around with Andy Warhol, the poet Rene Ricard, and even posed for Mapplethorpe. “We were living our lives ephemerally,” she recalls of the time. She became an actress purely by happenstance, after accompanying a friend on an audition. “The role called for a singer who could also speak Italian and sing opera – she flubbed it terribly,” she recalls. “The director came out and said, ‘You, you speak Italian, can you sing?’, and my friend said, ‘Well, I’d rather you got it than someone I don’t even know.’” A few days later she was in Berlin filming. “For somebody who was just graduating from college with no money, that was pretty good.”
Aside from being an actress and an ardent animal rights liberationist, Davis is also a singer songwriter. In fact, she was a musician before she broke into acting; she signed to Warner Brothers and wrote the Prince song “Slow Love”, which appears on his 1987 album Sign O’ the Times. Two years later, Nile Rodgers produced her record Heart of Gold. “I’m working on another record, and I’m writing a television show called The Riviera Gang, with another character that is a ‘citizen of the world’, basically playing myself,” she laughs. “It’s about the very rich being very bad in the south of France.” She is also working on a podcast about grief, having recently lost her husband, as well as a one-woman show called You’re Dead and I’m Not.
Davis credits Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age as inspiring her desire to pursue her creative instincts. “She talks about how we are a pioneer generation of women,” Davis says, “those of us who are fighting the patriarchal inner voice that we’re not supposed to do anything anymore because no one cares what we do, or think, or feel – women my age, we’re crashing right through that.” Even all these years later, she has great memories of her time on the show. “I remember being madly in love with Susan Seidelman – she allowed me a kind of freedom,” she continues. “I felt alive. I felt like the bubbles in champagne.” What does she think Amalita is doing now? “She is doing very well. She is having fun and is inside of me. And so I’m creating and having fun.”