Patricia Arquette’s Second Act
It’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon in a hotel in Pasadena, and Patricia Arquette, wearing a full-length crimson dress and red velvet heels, is being chased down a hallway by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. It’s not the most frenetic of action sequences—Dr. Ruth, a nonagenarian, moves slowly, but she pursues Arquette with the intention and focus of a bloodhound pursuing a scent. When she finally catches up to the actor—with the help of a publicist who bounds ahead—the two women are thrilled to encounter each other. They pose for a picture together, Arquette bending almost into a right angle to get closer to the diminutive German sex therapist. “You’re going to be on my Twitter,” Dr. Ruth tells her, with some pride. “You’re going to be on mine,” Arquette replies.
Arquette does indeed later tweet the photo, and Instagrams it too, with the hashtag #DrRuthArquette2020.
Whether or not she ends up as one half of a Westheimer presidential ticket, Arquette, at 50, is indisputably working through one of the most fascinating and gratifying moments of her career. In January she won a Golden Globe for her mewling, hypnotic portrayal of the prison worker Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell in Showtime’s , a seven-episode miniseries based on a 2015 prison break in, a true-crime story based on a feature about a mother and daughter locked in a poisonously codependent charade.
