Kristin Davis Biography

Kristin Lee Davis is an only child, and as her parents divorced when she was a baby, she was subsequently adopted by her stepfather in 1968 when he married her mother. She and her parents moved to Columbia, South Carolina when she was a child and her stepfather served as a psychology professor and the provost at the University of South Carolina. Davis lived in South Carolina and graduated from A.C. Flora High School there in 1983. She then moved to New Jersey where she went to Rutgers University.

Kristin had wanted to be an actress since she was 10 years old, and was cast in a community theatre production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but only really broke into professional acting after her 1987 graduation from university, when she moved to New York. She then spent eight years as a waitress and running a yoga studio with a friend in New York City before landing a 1995 role on Melrose Place as Brooke Armstrong Campbell. She was only on the show for one year, however, as the producers discovered that the viewers were not warming to her character. She also had small roles in television shows such as Friends and Seinfeld.

In 1998 Davis was cast as Charlotte York in Sex and the City, which has been her most famous role to date and propelled her to bona fide stardom. She remained in the cast until 2004, when the show ended, and stars in the 2008 Sex and the City Movie. Kristin was shot to fame not only by the overall success of the show, but by the niche that she both created and filled in the character of Charlotte: a preppy, elegant Upper East Side art dealer with a classic, conservative and chic fashion sense. Davis would become one of the four faces that epitomised the simultaneous glamour and realism of all thirty-something women.

Despite the success of the show and of her character, Davis was the only one of the four women not to be nominated for her performance, until 2004, when she received a nomination for the final season. When Sex and the City finished its run in 2004, Kristin went on to star in a television pilot for a show called Soccer Moms in 2005, in which she and Gina Torres played suburban mothers who also moonlighted as undercover detectives. The show was never picked up.

Kristin’s film career was never as prolific as her television success, until the Sex and the City Movie in 2008. Before that, she starred in a string of mediocre family movies, including Deck The Halls in 2006, a Christmas movie also starring Danny DeVito and the husband of her co-star Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick. Other films include The Shaggy Dog (2006) and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D (2005), both of which only enjoyed lukewarm success.

Davis is a recovering alcoholic, admitting that she was introduced to alcohol at an early age, probably due to her Southern upbringing. She says that alcohol freed her at the time, and that she still misses it, but has remained teetotal since the rehabilitation she went through in her mid 20s.

Davis has also admitted in the past that she had a weakness for dating actors. Past boyfriends include Alec Baldwin, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber and Steve Martin. She and Alec Baldwin both guest starred in Friends and Will and Grace, but at different times. Though all of these past boyfriends were high profile actors, Davis’ relationships were all fairly low-key and she is currently single and lives on her own in Los Angeles. She says: "If I had one wish for myself, it would be to fall in love. That's asking for trouble, but that's the truth."