Patricia Arquette turned down braces because perfect teeth didn't fit her
As a girl, Patricia Arquette refused her parents' offer to straighten her teeth, saying a perfect smile would not match who she was inside. That streak of self-possession carried her from a slasher sequel at 19 to an Oscar for a film shot across twelve years of her life.
She was born in Chicago on April 8, 1968, into a family of performers. Her grandfather was the comedian Cliff Arquette, her father Lewis acted and worked as a puppeteer, and siblings Rosanna, Richmond, Alexis and David all became actors too. The family surname had once been the French-Canadian Arcouet. For a while they lived on a commune in rural Virginia, growing poorer the longer they stayed, an experience she credits with deepening her empathy. As a teenager at Catholic school she dreamed of becoming a nun, and later a midwife.
At 14 she left home to live with Rosanna in Los Angeles. Her feature debut came in 1987 in Dream Warriors, the third Nightmare on Elm Street film, playing Kristen opposite Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger, but she declined to return for the next instalment so she could pursue other work. Recognition arrived with Tony Scott's True Romance in 1993, written by Quentin Tarantino, where her character Alabama Worley wins a brutal fight against James Gandolfini's killer.
The following years brought an unusually adventurous run. She played Johnny Depp's girlfriend in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, took twin roles in David Lynch's Lost Highway, starred in the horror hit Stigmata, which earned about three times its budget, and shared an ambulance with then-husband Nicolas Cage in Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead. Younger viewers may know her as the outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow in Disney's Holes.
Television gave her a second peak. She won an Emmy in 2005 for Medium, playing a character based on the real-life psychic Allison DuBois. The coming-of-age drama Boyhood, filmed between 2002 and 2014, cast her as a single mother and won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She then collected Golden Globes for Escape at Dannemora and The Act, and since 2022 has played the unnerving Harmony Cobel in Severance.
Source: Patricia Arquette
