Sarah Jessica Parker

Producer

• Born: March 25, 1965
• Place of Birth: Nelsonville, Ohio

ACTOR AND DESIGNER

Parker began acting in television, films, and theater at the age of eight. Her visibility soared when she played the role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, a popular series that presented a distinctly female perspective on relationships, sex, aging, and fashion.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment; fashion

Early Life

Sarah Jessica Parker was born March 25, 1965, in Nelsonville, Ohio. Her parents, Barbara and Stephen, had three older children. Parker’s father had grown up in Brooklyn. His grandfather had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. Reportedly, the family name was changed from Bar-Kahn to Parker at Ellis Island. An immigration official misunderstood the last name as Parken, which, in sloppy handwriting, became Parker. Stephen’s grandfather, happy and successful in New York, proudly adopted the new name. Barbara and Stephen divorced when Parker was young. Her mother married Paul Forste when Parker was three years old. Barbara and Paul had four more children and often struggled to make ends meet. Parker remembers being on welfare, occasionally not having electricity or telephone service, and years without birthday or Christmas presents. Parker and her sisters each got two pairs of shoes a year. Their mother shopped at thrift and outlet stores, sometimes buying the girls’ dresses for as little as ninety-nine cents.

Parker studied ballet and singing from a young age. Her first professional acting job was at age eight in a television special. Soon after, in 1976, she was cast in The Innocents on Broadway. The family moved to Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens, to help the children’s theater careers. It was a low-income community, formerly known as Welfare Island. Parker remembers distinctions being made among the resident families: those receiving more government subsidies had the less-desirable homes. Because they lived next to the parking lot, everyone knew her family’s poor situation. The money that Parker and her siblings made went to paying the family’s bills.

Parker and four of her siblings toured nationwide in a production of The Sound of Music (1959). She also performed on Broadway in Annie from 1977 to 1980, playing the lead role for the last year. Parker made her film debut in 1979’s Rich Kids. In 1982, she costarred in the short-lived television series Square Pegs.

Life’s Work

After graduating from high school, Parker stayed in Hollywood to pursue her acting career. In 1984, she costarred in Footloose with Kevin Bacon, Chris Penn, and John Lithgow. Parker starred in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, a 1985 teen film with Helen Hunt. Through the rest of the 1980s, Parker was in several television shows, television films, and major motion pictures. Among these was the miniseries, followed by a television series, A Year in the Life. In 1984, she began dating Robert Downey Jr. The pair split seven years later. In 1991, she was in the romantic comedy L.A. Story with Steve Martin. Parker’s career began taking off: She appeared in Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) with Nicolas Cage, Hocus Pocus (1993) with Bette Midler and Kathy Najimy, Ed Wood (1994), and several other films and television shows. During the early and mid-1990s, she dated singer Joshua Kadison and John F. Kennedy Jr. Parker also continued to work in the theater, both Broadway and Off-Broadway. Parker was introduced to actor Matthew Broderick by one of her brothers, who had acted with him on stage. Broderick and Parker both appeared in Broadway’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The couple married on May 19, 1997, in a nonreligious ceremony in a historic synagogue in Manhattan, and they moved to a brownstone in Greenwich Village. On October 28, 2002, Parker gave birth to their son, James Wilkie Broderick, named after Broderick’s father, James, and writer Wilkie Collins. Parker and Broderick's twin daughters, Marion and Tabitha, were born on June 22, 2009, via a surrogate.

Parker’s best-known role is Carrie Bradshaw in Home Box Office’s Sex and the City (1998–2004). The show followed the lives of Carrie and her three best friends: professional women in their thirties and forties living in New York City. Sex and the City was popular and made Parker a household name. Her work on the show won her four Golden Globes, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards. Parker was the only one of the show’s four lead actors who never appeared naked, because of a strict no-nudity clause in her contract.

Her role as Carrie transformed Parker into a fashion icon. In 2005, Parker released her first perfume, Lovely. A second, Covet, was released two years later. That same year, Parker launched a clothing and accessories line that was available only at Steve and Barry’s. Everything in her Bitten line sold for less than twenty dollars. She created several other perfumes: Covet Pure Bloom, Dawn, Endless, Twilight, and SJP NYC, which was inspired by Parker’s love of New York.

Parker returned to the big screen in 2005, with a number of semisuccessful films, including The Family Stone (2005) and Failure to Launch (2006). However, Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010) were box-office hits. She appeared in three episodes of the television show Glee in 2012 and 2013. She starred in the HBO series Divorce, which premiered in 2016. In 2021, Parker starred in the first of two seasons of the television drama And Just Like That, a continuation of Sex in the City, with Cynthia Nixon and Kristen Davis. In this series, the friends navigate life in their 50s. Parker starred in Hocus Pocus 2, a sequel to the 1993 film, in 2022.

Significance

Parker is best known for her role as Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. However, Parker has also had a successful career in theater and in fashion design. Parker became a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1997. Over the years, she has participated in many of the organization’s campaigns, including its annual Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF program, the lighting of the UNICEF Snowflake, and designing a limited-edition T-shirt for the tsunami relief fund. She traveled to Liberia in 2006 as a celebrity ambassador. Parker is also a member of Hollywood’s Women’s Political Committee and of the Innocence Project’s actors’ committee.

Bibliography

Fabrikant, Geraldine. “Talking Money with Sarah Jessica Parker.” New York Times. New York Times, 30 July 2000.

Feinberg, Scott. "Sarah Jessica Parker on “Painful” Kim Cattrall Rift: “There Just Isn’t Anyone Else Who’s Ever Talked About Me This Way” (Exclusive)." The Hollywood Reporter, 2 June 2022, www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/sarah-jessica-parker-kim-cattrall-feud-1235157754/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

McSweeney, Eve. "Sarah Jessica Parker: Show and Tell." Vogue. Condé Nast, 12 July 2011. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Pogrebin, Abigail. “Sarah Jessica Parker.” Stars of David. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

Shapiro, Marc. Sarah Jessica Parker. Toronto: ECW, 2001. Print.

Sohn, Amy. Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell. Rev. ed. New York: Pocket, 2004. Print.

Syme, Rachel. "Why Sarah Jessica Parker Keeps Playing Carrie Bradshaw." The New Yorker, 19 June 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/26/sarah-jessica-parker-profile. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.