It only seems appropriate that the Candadian Sex in the City would be based in L.A., which not many people know is actually Canada's second largest city. That's right, more Canadians live in L.A. than any other city except Toronto. And I can almost guarantee that most people in Toronto wish they were living in L.A. -- especially right now.

The article in Wednesday's Globe and Mail profiles "a scantily clad Brigitte Bako", a Canadian actress who spent a dozen years trying to break into the big time acting scene in L.A., but after some early successes ended up in soft-core porn. Well, at least she got lots of exposure on CityTV, so all her friends would get to see her acting...

From the article:

In G-Spot, Bako plays Gigi, a one-time acting prodigy whose roles in acclaimed films seemed destined to make her a star. Like the fictional version of herself, Bako started out on a roll, boarding a Voyageur bus, at age 19, from Montreal to New York, where her first, small movie role was in Woody Allen's 1989 New York Stories (her segment was directed by Martin Scorsese).

From there, Bako landed other decent parts in films such as One Good Cop (starring Michael Keaton). But then her luck turned. In the mid-1990s, her mother died. Her boyfriend dumped her and she was in a car accident that left her in traction for several months. She lost roles in four major studio pictures, including Don Juan DeMarco with Johnny Depp and The Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas.

When she got back on her feet, she opted to take a part in the soft-porn TV show, Red Shoe Diaries -- from which point she started aggressively accumulating material for the G-Spot scripts. "Red Shoe Diaries became this cult hit, and then basically every script I got after that I was naked by page four."

Her career then became an ever-growing repertoire of late-night B-movies, with titles such as Paranoia, Sweet Revenge and Wrong Number. Bako recalls she almost jumped on the Voyageur bus back to Montreal.

But at dinner parties, she kept her friends in stitches, recounting tales of her career lows. "They told me to write it down. So I did. I ended up with 10 scripts. I'd never written a thing in my life before," says Bako, most recently in HBO's The Mind of the Married Man.

Then Lantos heard through the entertainment grapevine that the actress, whom he'd met a few years earlier when she was in the feature I Love a Man in Uniform, had written some pretty funny stuff.

"He called me and said, 'Bako, I hear you wrote something,' " she says, adopting a strong Eastern European accent. "I said, 'Yup.' He says, 'I'm heading to the cottage and I want to read it.' I had four scripts at the time so I mailed them. At the end of his cottage vacation, he said, 'Well, Bako, you can write.' And so it started."

Gigi's co-stars are Stella, played by Heather Hanson (The Chris Isaak Show); Francesca, played by Kristin Lehman (Judging Amy); and Roxy, played by Kimberly Huie (Deep Impact). All are Canadians, now living in Los Angeles, who were repatriated to do G-Spot, which filmed for six gruelling weeks last summer.

"Every girl on this show is single," adds Bako. "I made sure of that. I wasn't going to hire anyone who had a better love life than me."

Featuring a blonde, a brunette, a raven-haired character and a redhead, Bako calls the cast a "Revlon ad in the making" and agrees the comparisons to Sex and the City are inevitable, if a tad old.

"Sex and the City is the grande dame. They started it all. But basically, any show that now comes along and talks about womanhood, sexuality or penises is going to be compared to it.

"What we have in common is that we all have vaginas. That's about it. We can't afford the shoes they wear. Our show is multiracial, multicultural, we're mostly unemployed and we can't get laid.

"We're celibacy in the suburb. That's what we are."