Patricia Arquette Biography

Actress. Born April 8, 1968, in Chicago, Illinois. Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Arquette has played an unusual mix of characters in her career, from a naïve prostitute in the film True Romance to a suburban mother with psychic powers in the television series Medium.

Arquette comes from a long line of performers. Her great-grandfather performed on the vaudeville circuit, and her grandfather Cliff Arquette often appeared on television as the folksy character Charley Weaver on Jack Parr's 1950s version of The Tonight Show. Arquette's father Lewis was an actor and director and her mother Mardi was a performer, a writer, and an activist. One of five children, Patricia followed her older sister Rosanna’s footsteps to become an actress. Her other remaining siblings Richmond, Alexis, and David have also worked in the entertainment industry.

In her early teens, Arquette went through a rebellious period in her life. She was caught shoplifting at the age of 12 and later shaved her head. At the age of 14, she moved in with her sister Rosanna. Rosanna was an up-and-coming actress at the time who soon made it big with the 1985 hit Desperately Seeking Susan. Patricia started acting, too, taking on roles in such films as Pretty Smart (1987) and Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).    

The following year, Arquette had her first child, a son named Enzo, with musician Paul Rossi. She also earned critical acclaim for her work as an actress after co-starring with Reese Witherspoon and Beau Bridges in the 1991 Lifetime made-for-TV movie Wildflower. It tells the story of a hearing-impaired girl who is misunderstood and abused by her father. Arquette earned a CableACE Award for Best Actress in a Movie or Miniseries for her performance.

Arquette also received positive reviews for her work in Sean Penn’s directorial debut, The Indian Runner (1991), about two brothers on opposite sides of the law. In the film, she played the girlfriend of Frank Roberts (Viggo Mortensen), a wayward criminal who tells his lawman brother Joe (David Morse) that he wants to reform himself. She then appeared opposite Liam Neeson and Joan Allen in Ethan Frome (1993), a film adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel. This dreary period drama failed to attract much of an audience. 

Later that year, Arquette made a splash on the big screen in the crime adventure tale True Romance (1993) as Alabama Whitman, a rookie streetwalker. Her character joins up with a comic book store clerk (Christian Slater) who helps her escape from her pimp (Gary Oldman). The two end up running away with a large amount of cocaine that belongs to the mob, which they try to sell to finance their escape abroad.

After several fast-paced action films, Arquette gave a more subdued performance in Ed Wood (1994), a biopic starring Johnny Depp as the famed B-movie director. She showed that she could handle comedic material as well, playing Ben Stiller’s wife in Flirting with Disaster (1996). Around this time, Arquette married actor Nicholas Cage.