When Patricia Arquette walked up on the stage and was handed a Golden Globe for her stunning performance as Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell in Ben Stiller’s prison drama Escape At Dannemora, anyone who had been following her career would not have been surprised. After all, Arquette has since taken home a Critics’ Choice award for the same show, although she did tie with Amy Adams for her performance in Sharp Objects. And next she will be “heard” in the new Toy Story film. Simply put, she Arquette is one of the finest actresses working today, on any size screen.
(And if you haven’t seen Escape At Dannemora already, you need to get on Stan.)
After making her big screen debut in A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, it was the late, great Tony Scott who gave her the role that would thrust the young actress into the cinema going consciousness. With a script by Quentin Tarantino, True Romance was a brilliant but brutal crime thriller spiced up with the then video-store-clerk-turned-director’s requisite uber-cool dialogue and Top Gun director Scott’s astute visual style. It didn’t hurt that the cast included Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman.
Reading that who’s who of titanic thespian talent you’d think that a young actress would struggle to be seen, but as Alabama Whitman, the sassy call girl with a heart of gold who marries a lonely Elvis Presley obsessed martial arts movie fan (wishful thinking on Tarantino’s part?) and steals drugs from her pimp, she shone. Together with Christian Slater, who played the aforementioned loner, the film made her career and ensured Arquette worked with some of the finest directors working today.
And what a line-up of directing talent! Arquette worked with Tim Burton on Ed Wood, David O. Russell on Flirting With Disaster, David Lynch in the delightfully bonkers Lost Highway, and Martin Scorsese on Bringing Out The Dead. She also won a best supporting actress Oscar for Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood, a film shot over a few weeks every year for 12 years to show the “real time” life of a young boy from the age of six to 18.
Arquette was also one of the first name actors to happily make her home on the small screen as Medium rode the tidal wave that was the new “golden age of TV”. Winning an Emmy for the first season, Arquette played Allison DuBois, a psychic medium who helps out the Phoenix, Arizona district attorney’s office on unsolvable murder cases. Arquette also took high profile roles in Boardwalk Empire and CSI: Cyber.
And now she is winning Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards and it’s easy to see why. Never afraid to act against type, she never returns to a familiar role. Her agent was no doubt swamped with bubbly gun-toting hooker roles after the success of True Romance, but she has never taken the easy option.
In fact, throughout a her career Arquette has never shied away from a challenge and never been afraid to not look her best, just look at Escape At Dannemora. Playing a prison worker who becomes entangled with two inmates, played by Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano, and helps them to escape, she creates an unforgettable character that is as repellent as she is fascinating.
But now, after a very adult role, she is doing it for the kids – with Pixar and the fourth outing for Buzz Lightyear and Woody in Toy Story 4. How her vocal talents will be used as a laid back hippy mom, we’ll have to wait and see.