Patricia Tiffany Arquette (born April 8, 1968) is an American actress. She made her feature film debut as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). Her other notable films include True Romance (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Lost Highway (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1998), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Stigmata (1999), Holes (2003), Fast Food Nation (2006), The Wannabe (2015), and Toy Story 4 (2019). For playing a single mother in the coming-of-age film Boyhood (2014), which was filmed from 2002 until 2014, Arquette won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

On television, she played the character Allison DuBois—based on the author and medium Allison DuBois, who claims to have psychic abilities—in the supernatural drama series Medium (2005–2011). She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2005, from two nominations she received for the role, in addition to three nominations at the Golden Globe Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards, respectively. Arquette also appeared in the CSI franchise as Avery Ryan, the Deputy Director of the FBI, starring in CSI: Cyber (2015–16). She went on to star as Joyce Mitchell in the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora (2018), winning the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie, and as Dee Dee Blanchard in the Hulu anthology series The Act (2019), winning the Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress. She currently stars as Harmony Cobel on the Apple TV thriller series Severance.

Early life and family
Arquette was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968 to Lewis Arquette, an actor, and Brenda Olivia "Mardi" (née Nowak), who was involved in the arts and worked as a therapist. Through her father, Patricia is distantly related to explorer Meriwether Lewis. Arquette's father had converted from Catholicism to Islam. Arquette's mother was Jewish, and her ancestors emigrated from Poland and Russia. Her father's family's surname was originally "Arcouet", and his paternal line was of French-Canadian descent. Her paternal grandfather was comedian Cliff Arquette. Patricia's siblings also became actors: Rosanna, Richmond, Alexis, and David. When she was a child, her parents offered to get her braces for her teeth, but she refused, telling them she wanted to have flaws because it would help her with character acting.

For a time her family lived on a commune in rural Bentonville, Virginia. She has said they became poorer the longer they lived there and she believes that experience enlarged her empathy. Her father was an alcoholic; her mother was violently abusive. When Arquette was seven, the family relocated to Chicago. They later settled in Los Angeles, California. Arquette attended Catholic school, and has said that when she was a teenager, she had wanted to be a nun. At the age of fourteen, Arquette ran away from home after learning her father was having an affair—she settled with her sister, Rosanna Arquette, in Los Angeles. She has described her father as a working actor for industrial films, commercials and voiceovers – he was best known for his role as J.D. Pickett in the TV series The Waltons. Before pursuing a career in acting, Arquette had wanted to be a midwife. She put this career prospect aside briefly in an attempt to gain acting jobs and gained success in the industry.