Patricia Arquette

American actress Patricia Arquette (1968) won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Boyhood (2014). She comes from a family of actors, including her sister Rosanna Arquette and first gained attention for her starring role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). In the following decade, she appeared in such critically acclaimed films as True Romance (1993), Ed Wood (1994) and Lost Highway (1997). She married and divorced Nicolas Cage and Thomas Jane, but somehow the talented actress never became the major film star many expected her to become. Instead, she became an acclaimed star on television.


Spanish collector card by Accion. Patricia Arquette in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993).


Canadian postcard by Canadian Postcard, no. A-366.


Spanish postcard in the Collección "Estrellas de actualidad" Cacitel, S.L., no. 98. Patricia Arquette in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993).

A free-spirited, kind-hearted prostitute

Patricia T. Arquette was born in Chicago in 1968. Arquette comes from a family of actors. Her father is actor Lewis Arquette, and her grandfather is comedian Cliff Arquette, best known in the United States for playing Charlie Weaver on the comedy quiz show Hollywood Squares. Her mother, Mardi, is not an actress. Her older sister Rosanna and her three brothers, Alexis (who died in 2016), Richmond, and David Arquette, also became actors.

Patricia spent her childhood with her siblings in a commune near Arlington, Virginia, where she also took acting classes. At the age of 15, she ran away from home to live with her older sister, Rosanna Arquette, for a while. In 1987, she played her first film role in Pretty Smart (Dimitri Logothetis, 1987). Her first leading role came later that year in the Slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (Chuck Russell, 1987) opposite Robert Englund. Critics consider it one of the best films in the cult series, also due to her acting performance.

Her career took off in the 1990s. For her role as a deaf, epileptic girl in the television film Wildflower (Diane Keaton, 1991), she received a CableACE Award. In 1993, she appeared as Alabama Whitman, a free-spirited, kind-hearted prostitute in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993). The film was a moderate box office success but became a cultural landmark because of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay, which preceded Pulp Fiction.

The following year, she played Ed Wood's second wife in Tim Burton's well-received biopic Ed Wood (1994) starring Johnny Depp. In 1995, she received widespread attention for her role in Beyond Rangoon (John Boorman, 1995) and her marriage to film star Nicolas Cage.

Her next films included the comedy Flirting with Disaster (David O'Russell, 1996) with Ben Stiller, David Lynch's Neo-Noir psychological thriller Lost Highway (1997), the Western The Hi-Lo Country (Stephen Frears, 1998), and the Horror film Stigmata (Rupert Wainwright, 1999) with Gabriel Byrne. She also appeared in the music video for the Rolling Stones' song 'Like a Rolling Stone'. With Nicolas Cage, she co-starred in Martin Scorsese's film Bringing Out the Dead (1999). The film received highly favourable critical reviews, but was a box office flop.


Spanish postcard by Memory Card, no. 87. Image: lobby card with Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993). The Spanish title is Amor a quemarropa.


Spanish postcard by Memory Card, no. 88. Image: lobby card with Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993). The Spanish title is Amor a quemarropa.

A film intermittently shot over 12 years

In the comedy Little Nicky (Steven Brill, 2000), Patricia Arquette played the girl whom the lanky son of the devil, played by Adam Sandler, has a crush on. Despite being a box office hit, the film received negative reviews, although Roger Ebert called it Sandler's best film to date.

The following year, she starred in the French American drama Human Nature (2001), the film debut of music video director Michel Gondry. In the film, based on a script by Charlie Kaufman, she played a woman whose body is covered in fur.

In 2002, she also began to play a single mother in the coming-of-age film Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014). The film was shot intermittently over 12 years, as the boy, played by Eli Coltrane, grew from child to young adult. Arquette played his mother and won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her role.

In 2005, she transitioned to television. In the NBC series Medium (2005-2011), she played Allison DuBois, a psychic who uses her gifts to solve crimes. She received an Emmy Award for Best Actress for her role in 2005 and was nominated three times for a Golden Globe. She continued to work on TV in such series as Boardwalk Empire (2013-2014) and CSI: Cyber (2015-1016). For her roles as a prison worker in the miniseries Escape at Dannemora (Ben Stiller, 2018) and as Dee Dee Blanchard in the miniseries The Act (2019), Arquette won Golden Globe Awards. She also won an Emmy Award for The Act.

She can now be seen in the hit series Severance (Ben Stiller, a.o., 2022-2025). Patricia Arquette was married to Nicolas Cage from 1995 to 2001. In 2002, she became engaged to actor Thomas Jane. The couple married in 2006 and divorced in 2011. They have a daughter together, Harlow Jane, born in 2003. Arquette also has a son, Enzo Rossi, born in 1989, from her relationship with musician Paul Rossi. Her mother died of breast cancer in 1997. Since then, Arquette has raised awareness for the disease in various ways.


British postcard by London Cardguide LTD, London. Photo: Buena Vista International / Touchstone Pictures. Patricia Arquette and Johnny Depp in Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994). Caption: Winner 2 Oscars. At cinemas across the West End from May 26.


Chinese postcard. Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).

Sources: Emily (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English) and IMDb.