Actress Patricia Arquette is the granddaughter of Cliff Arquette, the daughter of character actor Lewis Arquette, and the sister of leading lady Rosanna Arquette and actors David Arquette and Alexis Arquette. Inaugurating her own film career in the mid-1980s, the actress came into her own with a gallery of fine portrayals in the 1990s. In 1993 alone, she was seen as the hero's cousin/inamorata in Ethan Frome, the strung-out "heroine" of the stylishly violent road movie True Romance, and the hero's lesbian sister in Inside Monkey Zetterland. Arquette closed out 1994 on a fine note with her sympathetic portrayal of Kathy O'Hara, the second wife of Hollywood's "world's worst director," in Tim Burton's Ed Wood.

The following year included a starring role in John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon and a marriage to actor Nicolas Cage. In 1996, Arquette had lead roles in a number of films, most notably David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster, in which she played Ben Stiller's put-upon wife. She then switched gears with starring roles in David Lynch's Lost Highway and the thriller Nightwatch. In 1998, she tried her hand at Westerns, playing the object of Woody Harrelson's and Billy Crudup's desires in Stephen Frears' The Hi-Lo Country. Despite an interesting premise and excellent cast, the film flopped, but Arquette continued to work steadily the following year, with lead roles in the black comedy Goodbye, Lover; Stigmata, in which she starred opposite Gabriel Byrne as a the unwitting target of a supernatural phenomenon; and Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, a film starring Arquette's husband Cage as a burnt-out paramedic.