With her shrewd blue eyes and twitching dormouse nose, the actor Frances Sternhagen, who has died aged 93, could turn on a dime between consoling warmth and implacable frostiness. She was a multiple Emmy nominee for her guest appearances as two comically meddling mothers. In Sex and the City, between 2000 and 2002, she played Bunny, who can manipulate her pampered son, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), into doing her bidding simply by squeezing his wrist.
Oblivious to boundaries, Bunny enters his apartment late at night to smear Vicks VapoRub on his chest; his wife, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is sleeping beside him, wakes up and joins in. “It is both sick and erotic, and Franny was up for it,” said the show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King. “It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” said Sternhagen.
