Real LI

Kim Cattrall's fans may be be surprised to learn that unlike her bed-hopping, hard-partying "Sex in the City" character, her idea of fun is much more mellow: inviting friends over for a home-cooked dinner at her East Hampton beach house.

“I stay at home a lot,” Cattrell tells Hamptons magazine. “I don’t go to a lot of parties.”

Cattrall, who plays publicist Samantha Jones in the HBO series and highly anticipated movie opening this week, lives a loft-like East Hampton home year-round. “It’s a different town off-season. They call it Tumbleweed Tuesday after Labor Day. My little beach house is my sanity.”

Cattrall keeps her waterfront East End refuge low-key, with an English garden with daffodils and an office without any phone. “I grew up in a very small town on Vancouver Island in Canada,” she tells the magazine. “That’s why the Hamptons is so important to me. It’s closer to what I grew up with ... It’s a different kind of pace.”

At least one other "Sex and the City" star lives in the Hamptons: Sarah Jessica Parker and husband, Matthew Broderick, own a home in Amagansett, which they bought in 2005 for a reported $4.7 million.