Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 25, 1995 TAG: 9508250127
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DINITIA SMITH THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There is her little-girl voice, almost a whisper. The crooked tooth, as if from sucking her thumb. Then, there are the tight dress, bleached blond hair, milky skin, glowing blue eyes.
Patricia Arquette, 27, is a million-dollar girl - that's the fee she got for ``Beyond Rangoon,'' directed by John Boorman, which opens today.
Until now, audiences have seen Arquette mostly in roles displaying her peculiar blend of sexuality and innocence - the gum-popping hooker in ``True Romance,'' the loyal wife in ``Ed Wood,'' the servant girl in ``Ethan Frome,'' the witless pregnant teen-ager in Sean Penn's ``Indian Runner.''
Like a whole generation of actresses - Meg Ryan, Melanie Griffiths, Jennifer Jason Leigh - Arquette plays women who are sexual and at the same time child-like and unthreatening. Arquette plays the role better than most, with an almost frightening openness.
``Some women told me your uterus gets larger when you pass over the equator,'' she says. ``I'm so gullible, I'm such a sucker that I believed them!''
For the first time, in ``Beyond Rangoon,'' Arquette is asked to contain the child-like sexuality that is her signature and perhaps her principal defense. She plays a doctor who travels to Burma on a voyage of self-discovery.
For the role, Arquette dyed her hair brown and was made to look as if she weren't wearing any make-up. ``She has no sexuality!'' Arquette says of her character. Not to use her vibrant sexuality was ``terrifying,'' Arquette says. There was a ``possibility of failure.''
Why ask a sultry actress to play such a part? When John Boorman saw Arquette in ``True Romance,'' he says, ``I was very impressed by her range, her unpredictable quality and a kind of boldness. When I met her I found a curious mixture of toughness and fragility.''
Arquette is a fourth-generation member of the performing Arquette family. Her great-grandparents were vaudevillians, her grandfather was the actor Cliff Arquette, and her father, Lewis Arquette, was an actor on Broadway. Patricia's sister, Rosanna, played a New Jersey housewife in ``Desperately Seeking Susan'' and her brother Alexis played Lee Harvey Oswald in a Steppenwolf Theater production of ``Libra'' (he also has a nightclub act as the drag queen Eva Destruction). Her brother David, 24, is in the forthcoming ``Wild Bill,'' with Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin. Her brother Richmond, 31, is also an actor.
Their childhood reads like a parody of a '60s upbringing. Both parents changed their names three times, as they veered from one spiritual quest to another. Eventually, their father converted to Islam. Their mother, Mardi (short for Mardiningshi), is Jewish. The Arquettes are now separated.
The Arquette children were raised on a ``Subud'' commune in Virginia. (Subudism, says Lewis Arquette, is a ``nonsectarian fellowship,'' originating in Indonesia, that fosters meditation.) The family also observed Islam. The Arquettes began performing early in a children's version of Paul Sills' Story Theater.
They insist there is no competition among them. ``People expect friction,'' Rosanna Arquette says. ``Leave us alone! I have my own work. I'm incredibly proud of Patricia.'' Because right now, it is Patricia who is in the spotlight.
A decade ago, however, she was in full rebellion. During what she calls, ``those troubled estrogen-explosion periods, I went from being an angel to a scathing, fire-breathing lunatic.''
At 12, she was arrested for shop-lifting. At 14, she shaved her head and ran away to live with Rosanna. At 19, she became pregnant by a musician. Her child, Enzo, is the fifth generation of Arquettes in the entertainment business, playing Arquette's dead child in ``Beyond Rangoon.''
For many years, Arquette says, she was in search of ``an honorable, truthful, brave man.'' Eight years ago, she dated the actor Nicolas Cage, but they lost touch. Last spring she ran into him again. ``He was on my mind,'' she says. ``I needed to be reassured that the depth of his love would be as brave as before.''
She was apparently reassured, and then some. They were married on top of a cliff in Carmel, Calif., in April.
Arquette returned recently from England, where she had been shooting a role in Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel ``The Secret Agent.''
Despite her part in ``Beyond Rangoon,'' she says, she has not given up playing roles that emphasize her amalgam of sex-kitten and cracked innocence. ``I want to bounce all over the place,'' she says. ``I don't want to bore myself. There's nothing funner than playing somebody who has a lot of tricks up her sleeve.''
by CNB