Rosanna Arquette's Crash Landing

by Sophie de Rakoff

"I met Rosanna on an airplane flying to Warsaw in 1980. I saw this incredibly beautiful girl—and you don't see many pretty girls flying to Warsaw—so I was hoping to sit next to her. One night during shooting, we went to a bar and it was raided by the police, who divided us into Americans and Poles. All of a sudden Rosanna jumped on the back of one of these guys—she can be quite dramatic, you know—and began hitting him with her handbag. I've just adored her ever since. She's fearless. She's been hitting the bad guys with handbags for many years." —Griffin Dunne, actor

As I sit at the country-style dining table in Rosanna Arquette's Hollywood Hills home amid her photos and dog, seeing the leopard-print carpeting on the stairs and listening to her talk on the phone with her two-year-old daughter, Zoe, Rosanna becomes real to me. The quintessential 80's "it chick," admired by Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Hal Ashby and Luc Besson, is now focused and grounded. There's no drama where there was before," she says. At 37—"Fuck it, I'm not going to lie about my age"—she's left behind "the child-woman place I was in," which made her the perfect star in movies like Baby It's You, After Hours, Desperately Seeking Susan and New York Stories but eventually stalled her career. Now, marriage to Geffen A&R hotshot Jon Sidell and her young daughter have given her the momentum she needs to enter a prolific period of reinvention.

"I call her the John Travolta of girls. She has a great gift and an enormous range professionally, as well as a remarkable generosity of spirit. She's going to burst back the way Travolta did." —Linda Obst, producer and author.

It was Tarantino who first pulled Arquette—as well as Travolta—back into the limelight, casting her as the tattooed and pierced drug bunny, Jody, in Pulp Fiction (1994). After giving birth to her daughter, Arquette returned to acting at the end of '94 with what she calls a "newfound energy," which director David Cronenberg tapped into when he cast her in Crash as Gabrielle, the sexual adventurer in full body brace. Cronenberg offered her the part of the bisexual accident victim not only because she had the right combination of "vulnerability and sexuality," he says, but also because "she was at a place in her career where she was being underused, and I knew she was as good as and indeed better than ever before." Now scripts for Arquette arrive daily, as a new generation of directors allow the actress to move beyond the kooky waitress-type characters of Nobody's Fool and The Linguini Incident and embrace increasingly dark and diverse roles. With performances as an uptight Southern mother in the Pate brothers' Liar (costarring Tim Roth and Renee Zellweger) and a cradle snatching convenience-store robber on the run with her 17-year-old lover in Sandra Locke's directorial debut, Do Me a Favor, already in the can, Arquette is now free to concentrate on the next batch of projects, which are all equally as twisted: She plays a serial killer in The Secret Life of Scarlett Bea and a junkie who sings the blues in Hell's Kitchen, by writer-director Tony Cinciripini.

"Crash has had a very turbulent life so far, and Rosanna is fiercely loyal and has been a fantastic ally as well as a collaborator in the film. She was fierce through all the ups and downs—whether it was at Cannes or the Ted Turner problems—to the point where you're almost afraid to unleash her on your enemies." —David Cronenberg, director

As the eldest sibling in the increasingly successful Arquette dynasty, Rosanna, who began acting in her teens, was known as the queen of the independent film scene ("It's true, really. You can ask around") back when the Lili Taylors of today were still in high school. Approached by John Landis to do Animal House while still a teenager, Arquette had to pass on the project because of a prior TV-movie commitment. Bit parts in movies like Blake Edwards' SOB characterized her early career until Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne, who was producing a John Sayles movie, cast her as the worried, thoughtful kid in Baby It's You. "It was the first movie of that genre," she says, stirring honey into her tea. "It was a teen movie but an art film at the same time. I feel comfortable in independent movies—that's where my heart is. There was a while there when I was top of the list and I would get offered movies like Top Gun, but I was such a snob that I would turn them down to do some tiny film. People judged me for that, and I probably made some really bad buisness decisions, but ultimately I'm the one who has to live with the character and be comfortable in my own skin, and it's independent films that excite me."

"I still have a real admiration for Rosanna Arquette, who has that quality of being able to confide rather than perform in certain roles. She lets us in on things instead of simply presenting them." —Roger Ebert, film critic

In the 80's, Arquette rebelled against Hollywood and moved to Europe, dividing her time between London and Paris—"Even though I came back here to work," she points out. Part of Europe's appeal included musician Peter Gabriel, with who she had a tumultuous, decade-long relationship that she can now describe as "unstable." (The couple broke up in 1992.) "Sure, it's O.K. to talk about Mr. Peter," Arquette allows. "We lost touch for awhile. We had a misunderstanding and a falling out, but it is healed and cleared up and our relationship is entering a new phase."Arquette calls two of the most powerful women in Hollywood, Meg Ryan and Linda Obst, her close friends. Ryan is "one of my most special dear friends. We're gal pals. We talk on the phone. I love her," she says. Arquette describes Obst—now almost a celebrity-level producer since the success of her book, Hello, He Lied—whom she met through Ryan, as a "mentor" and "smart, smart, smart. I'm in awe of her." Arquette has a movie in development with her friends, based on her affair with Gabriel. "It's about a girl and a rock star," she outlines. "If [Peter] can write songs about [the relationship], I can do a movie."Segueing into an extracurricular career on the other side of the camera, Arquette also has another film in the works, which she will direct herself in 1998. "Originally it was something for me to act in, and then I realized I had to direct it," she says. "And at this stage, I think I know it's better to let someone younger take the role I was going to play myself. I know every actor wants to direct, but I'm so happy to be going in that direction. I love actors. I want to focus on performance—there's too much emphasis on the technical."Arquette tells me she has written three fan letters in her life, all to women: Debra Winger ("Years ago"), Jennifer Jason Leigh ("Because she's amazing") and Holly Hunter, whom she describes as a "hero. I was so blown away by her performance in The Piano. She inspired me so much that I wanted to go out again and do amazing work."So how did it feel to make out with Hunter in the backseat of a car in Crash? Arquette cracks up. "She's such a good kisser! Holly's so tough and amazing and cool and smart as a person that I just loved making out with her. We had the whole 'Have you ever kissed a girl before?' conversation. It was freezing and I had practically nothing on—maybe a miniskirt—so it felt good to cuddle up against her and be warm."

"When I was a kid at school, I would sit outside at lunch and dream about the kind of girl I wanted to be with, the kind of girl you could ride with on your minibike, steal snacks with, then go home and listen to King Crimson and Yes. That's the kind of girl Rosanna is." —Vincent Gallo, actor and progressive-rock fan

Arquette is owning up to everything today, including her love of progressive rock. Apparently it's not that fashionable to be into prog rock (King Crimson, early Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant): "You don't really admit to it to a lot of people," she says, but the listeners who tune into Morning Becomes Eclectic, the alternative early-morning show on which Arquette has guest-hosted, would disagree. Tucked away upstairs in her house is her music room, in which a super-high-tech console is the focus, drawing attention away from the photos of Rosanna with Scorsese, Madonna and other friends and coworkers that lie alongside the many pictures of her husband and child."I understand music. I love music. Some of my closest friends are musicians, but I never had any aspirations to get up there myself," Arquette says, though she shyly admits that she will sing three songs in character—backed by Neil Young's band—in Hell's Kitchen. "It's the director who wanted me to do it. He kept telling me, 'I know you can do it, I know you can!'" And can she? "I don't know! But if I can't, I'm going to get a friend like Chrissie Hynde to go into a studio and pretend to be me."

"I thought I had a sexy overbite until I met Rosanna Arquette." —Linda Fiorentino, actress

Arquette met Hynde, the lead singer of the Pretenders, while she was living in London. Another factor in her moving to Europe—"Where I learned the love of wine and a good cheese"—was her reaction to the Hollywood studio that made her a scapegoat for the American box-office failure of Luc Besson's The Big Blue. "That was a big smack in the face for me," she recalls. "I got involved in this whole political thing, and I think I actually said at one point, 'I hate Hollywood and I'm moving to Paris,' which I did." She now admits that it wasn't the best career move: "I sabotaged myself constantly at that period of my life. I was hyper and wild and I never stayed in one city longer than six months because I was so restless. I was always in a place of drama: I'd get offered a big role and I'd be like, 'I can't do that, I'm going on a rock tour.'" The "craziness" that she attributes in part to being raised in "an all-American dysfunctional family—artistic for sure, but crazy" reached far into her life, including her craft. "My life is cool now. This is the first time I've gotten to work in that place. I always had these crazy, dramatic relationships, and used them to feed into my work, but they actually took so much energy away that ultimately the work suffered." It is only in recent years that she has been able to break the pattern. "I can't get into these neurotic, indulgent places now that I have a child, and I don't want to. I feel better and happier and more grounded than I ever have in my life. It's so exciting to go to work now and actually work. I'm as busy as it's possible to be, and I still dedicate myself to being a mother. Zoe is not going to take a backseat to my career; that's why I waited."Arquette proudly rearranges a heart-shaped cushion customized with a laminated photo of her daughter—a Valentine's present from her husband—and sums it up: "I'm in this really great place where things are coming together. No decisions are made in my life that don't work for my family. I've got a real marriage, a real partnership and now we have a third person. If I don't have to carry every movie, then that's great." She laughs again. "I can come in and do my supporting-actor role and go home." The cushion is now straight. "There are no accidents in life."