Hollywood star Patricia Arquette: I married, had a child and got divorced while making this movie

 
Lives in the spotlight: Patricia Arquette (Picture: Getty)
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Hollywood star Patricia Arquette admits a lot has happened in her life during a 12-year movie project.

She found and lost love and added to her family while playing struggling mother Olivia in Boyhood.

The film was shot for a week every year as it charts the progress of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and his sister Samantha (director Richard Linklater’s daughter Lorelei), while their absent father, played by Ethan Hawke, re-enters their lives.

Arquette hailed it as a tribute to mothers and “the importance of the mum and how many mums have struggled to raise their kids”.

She hoped it would seem real, adding: “I didn’t want to Hollywood everything up. We wanted it to resonate with human beings.” The star, divorced from actor Nicolas Cage just before shooting began, said she had drawn on her own life “minorly”.

Coming soon: Patricia Arquette with Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood (Picture: Allstar)

On the shoot, she began a relationship with actor Thomas Jane, had a daughter, Harlow, with him and got married in 2006 before splitting up three years later. They briefly reconciled but filed for divorce in 2010.

Arquette, whose hits include True Romance and Ed Wood, said: “Before I started this, I only had a son. By the time I ended this, I had a daughter and a son. And I’d gotten married and got divorced. There’s a feeling of failure in divorce, even if it’s right for everybody.”

She hoped the film’s acclaim would encourage financiers to be bolder, saying: “This business is being run by bankers. Maybe the movie will make money and the hope is they will then be a little bit more experimental in their support.

“Gambling a little bit of money on this small movie, we have ended up with something really unique and special.”

She said it was utterly different from the blockbusters contributing to the “slow demise” of independent films but believed it had clicked with audiences because people are so addicted to their phones and tablets that they miss “human-ness”.

Arquette, 46, whose recent work includes Boardwalk Empire, said she was “super-excited” from the start of the project but “amazed” that Linklater raised the money for it.

Boyhood is in cinemas on Friday.

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