The pending debt that Patricia Arquette has settled with her sister Alexis and the trans community
The actress, known for her marked activism, compensated in her recent Emmy speech the contempt that Hollywood made years before to the little girl in the saga, who died in 2016
When she was a child, Patricia Arquette's (Chicago, 1968) best friend was Alexis, her trans sister, only 15 months younger than her. Her parents were two actors who embraced the hippie culture of the 1970s. They were raised along with her three other siblings, Rosanna, David and Richmond, in a Virginia commune. But it was not the place where she grew up, but the wounds of her biography that have shaped the character of the interpreter of Boyhood, unusually vindictive for a movie star of her stature.
The death of her mother in 1997 due to breast cancer pushed her to collaborate with associations that fight against the disease. When she won the Emmy for best supporting actress in a miniseries or a television movie on September 22 for The Act, her goal was another. She wanted to pay off an outstanding debt: the one that Hollywood had with her sister Alexis de Ella, who died in 2016.
“All this that is happening to me is wonderful, but deep down I am very sad. I lost my sister and trans people are still persecuted. I'm in mourning every day of my life, Alexis. And I will be the rest of my life for you, until we change the world so that trans people are not discriminated against, ”she said on stage in a speech that has gone viral on social networks.
Two and a half years earlier, she publicly showed her anger at the Hollywood Academy for not including her sister in the In Memoriam at the Oscars that year. Before dying of HIV-related heart disease that she contracted as a teenager, Alexis had starred in films such as Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Isabel Coixet's Things I Never Told You. With these recent words, Patricia Arquette compensated for that offense.
“We had a long conversation when she confessed to me that she was trans (in 2006). I said: It's okay. So what do you do with Hollywood? How are you going to get a job? People are not that progressive in the industry and it could really negatively affect your career. Are you thinking about everything that can happen? ”, Arquette commented to People magazine after forgetting the Academy.
On the day of Alexis's death, the family of the trans actress wanted to remember how her reality had condemned her to oblivion: "Her career was cut short, not because of her death, but because of her decision to live her truth and her life," she said. the rest of the clan members in a statement.
First woman, then star
The five Arquette brothers imitated their parents and dedicated themselves to acting. Patricia sneaked into the less glamorous side of the industry at the beginning, in independent productions where the trade made up for the lack of budget.
She turned down a great opportunity at age 19 by refusing to shoot Last Exit Brooklyn. She discovered that she was pregnant by her boyfriend at the time, the punk singer Paul Rossi, and she preferred not to expose herself to shooting the scenes of violence that the project required.
In the years that followed, she acted for Tim Burton, Stephen Frears, and David Lynch. And she decided before anyone else to go to television. She refused to subject her body to diets that would allow her to enter the tiny sizes that the movies demanded of her.
She found refuge in 2005 in the series Medium, on a screen that, in addition to being small, was still considered second-rate at the time. She succeeded despite being asked by one of the producers of the weekly drama before shooting to lose the weight she had gained during pregnancy with Ella Harlow's daughter, born in 2003. She refused to do so, but he got the part from her.
And so, aging naturally for more than ten years in front of Richard Linklater's camera for the atypical and prolonged filming of Boyhood, is how she managed, at the age of 45, to become the actress she had always wanted to be.
"To all the women who have given birth, who pay their taxes and who are citizens of my nation, we have fought for the rights of all others. It is time that we once and for all have the same salary (that the men) and the same rights for women in the United States of America”, she said in 2015, when she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for this work.
She was referring to the fact that, in her country, women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. Her words also spread through the internet then. At the recent Emmy ceremony, it was her sister Alexis's turn.
