Candace Bushnell

Candace Bushnell, the former New York Observer columnist-turned-best selling- novelist, with the blonde highlights and piercing blue eyes made a living writing about women like herself - i.e. Manhattan-dwelling, thirty-something glamazons who loved their cosmopolitans and Jimmy Choo shoes as much as they loved their single status. But while New Yorkers had long admired the svelte blonde's work, it was not until 1998, when HBO turned Bushnell's best selling book Sex and the City -- which was based on her column of the same name - into an iconic TV series, that Bushnell became known to the rest of America. As the inspiration behind the perpetually single fashonista, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell became a star in her own right and on a scale she had previously only dreamed of.