Note: Spoilers Below

Carrie Bradshaw is the fictional narrator and lead character of the HBO sitcom/drama Sex and the City, played by actress Sarah Jessica Parker. She is a semi-autobiographical character created by Candace Bushnell, who published the book Sex and the City, based on her own columns in the New York Observer.

On the HBO series, Bradshaw is a New York newspaper columnist, party girl, fashionista, and later, freelance writer for Vogue. Her weekly column, "Sex and the City," provides the title, story lines, and narration for each episode.

In 2005, Carrie Bradshaw was listed as number 11 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters.

Character history

cquote: I revealed too much too soon. I was emotionally slutty.

Carrie writes a weekly column called "Sex and the City" for the fictional newspaper, The New York Star. The column focuses on Carrie's sexual escapades and those of her close friends, as well as musings about the relationships between men and women, dating, and New York. It provides Carrie with a certain amount of recognition in the city. People who read her column occasionally describe her as their icon. In the third season, her column is optioned for a film starring a fictionalized Matthew McConaughey. In the fifth season, some of her columns are compiled into a book.

At the end of season four, Carrie begins to write freelance articles for Vogue. Although she initially has trouble dealing with Enid (Candice Bergen), her abrasive editor at Vogue, she does find her feet, and ends up befriending her.

Carrie is an on-again, off-again smoker. She frequently smokes "Marlboro Lights" although her cigarettes have a brown filter, and Marlboro Lights have a noticeably white filter. She tries to quit in seasons 3 and 4 using the patch when she is dating Aiden. She enjoys cocktails (particularly Cosmopolitans—her character's fondness for them helped to popularize the drink), but she is, at heart, an old-fashioned girl, and is deeply romantic. She is on an endless search for true love, and refuses to settle for, as she puts it, "anything less than butterflies." Despite this, she repeatedly expresses doubts that she is the type to get married and raise a family.

Carrie is a resident of Manhattan, New York. She lives in a brownstone on the Upper East Side at the fictional house number of 245, on East 73rd Street, between Park and Madison. She lives in this apartment throughout the series, and buys it in the fourth season. In the initial episodes of the first season, Carrie's apartment is seen to be above a coffee shop somewhere near the vicinity of Madison Avenue. By approximately the fourth episode, the usual facade of a series of brownstones adjacent to hers is adopted, and remains that way throughout the series. The first episode also features a different apartment from the one used for the next 95 episodes, and the movie.