Actor, mother, activist, tireless campaigner for women’s rights and three-time Golden Globe winner, Patricia Arquette turns 55 today.

Born in Chicago and raised in a rural community in Bentonville, Virginia before settling in Los Angeles, Arquette descends from a line of entertainers: her father, Lewis, was an actor; her paternal grandfather, Cliff, was a comedian. All of her siblings went into the acting profession – her older sister Roseanna, brothers Richmond and David, and her younger sister Alexis who tragically passed away from HIV/AIDS in 2016. Arquette’s two children – son Enzo Rossi, 24 and daughter Harlow Jane, 20 (with ex-husband Thomas Jane) – are both actors as well.
Arquette made her feature film debut in 1987 as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and a name for herself in True Romance (1993) and Ed Wood (1994). 1997’s The Lost Highway cemented her career, and for the ten-year labor of love, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and the first of three Golden Globes in 2015. Her other two Globes are for Escape at Dannemora (2018) and The Act a year later. When Boyhood came out, Arquette was nominated for more than 30 different awards. She showed up for most of them. One of them still makes her chuckle: “The AARP award. It’s for the elderly, the Association of Retired People. I lost that one. The one that got away.”

Her first television work was in Medium which had a six-season run. She followed it up on the CSI spinoff CSI: Cyber. The choice to work on a TV series afforded her more time to be in one place and with her family, but it also satisfied a personal interest in the supernatural and cyber security.
During Arquette’s childhood the family was struggling financially, an experience she drew on for her performance in Boyhood as she told the HFPA: “You are a product of your childhood. My mom struggled a lot and financially we struggled a lot, so I sort of have the heart of a poor child, the memory of a poor child, and like, oh, we can’t buy that and we can’t have that. We had everything we needed, but we couldn’t have more than we needed.” Despite the family’s hardships and her parents’ marriage problems, she had a close relationship with her father. “I was daddy’s little girl, I love my dad so much. And I had this kind of surrogate paternal relationship with a lot of male directors that I worked with. They were very fatherly to me and took me under their wing.”
At 15, she ran away from home and moved in with Roseanna, with whom she continues to have a very close connection. “We’re fiercely defensive of each other. I’m blown away by my sister. She was one of the first people who came out, talked about Harvey Weinstein. I am not only incredibly inspired by my sister’s acting because I think she’s a wonderful actress, but also her activism in the world.”
Activism is something she shares with Roseanna. Patricia spearheads the movement for women to receive equal pay rights, a cause she is so passionate about that she addressed it in her acceptance speech at the Oscars. She also founded an NGO that deals with ecological sanitation in the developing world, has worked with the Eracism Foundation, Libby Ross Foundation, The Art of Elysium, and The Heart Truth. How she makes time for all this besides her career? “I’m the cat that lives nine lives,” she laughs

At 55, she is only halfway there with everything she still wants to accomplish. Her directorial debut, Gonzo Girl is in post-production, she is executive producing the upcoming series High Desert and starring in Severance.