These days Patricia Arquette has been playing nothing but sirens, though she does not look much like a wicked woman. For a start, she's tiny: 5ft 2in maximum. The eyes, slightly close-set, are light green and surprisingly clear. She has a breathy, high-pitched, sing-song voice, a little reminiscent of Monroe, and just about every Internet website devoted to her has a recording of it purring "You're soooo cool!", her signature line from True Romance, in which she played a trainee hooker.
When we meet, Arquette is escorted by her husband, Nicolas Cage. Seen together, they're an incongruous if, by all accounts, well-matched couple: Cage is intense, gloomy, saturnine and taciturn, while she is blonde, vivacious and faintly ditsy. Perhaps that's why she can pull off these characters who come across, on paper, as rather unlikeable: she projects a sweetness and an old-fashioned, un-feminist vulnerability that would - should she want - allow her to get away with, well, murder.
"I thought a man would fall in love with her. Our collaboration consisted of my worshipping whatever she did," says the director Stephen Frears in his usual lugubrious fashion, explaining why he cast Arquette in The Hi-Lo Country, a western set in the wastelands of New Mexico during and after the second world war. In it, she plays a faithless wife who sows bitterness and rivalry between three lonesome cowboys.
"There's not much place for cowboys in America today," she says. "They've become like a splinter group, an indigenous people that has been forgotten. It's the chivalrous part of them that I like. I remember this guy asked me for my autograph at a rodeo. He took off his hat and asked me to sign it 'here, under the band, so I don't muss it up with my sweat'. They're very, like, 'Hey, little lady, let me get the door for you'. Yeah, little lady! Get the door for me! I like that!
"My character is a brave, modern woman. She married to survive, but she realises she's just a trophy: and so her attitude is 'like it or not, this is who I am, this is what I want, this is how I feel'. It's not gonna be popular but that's the way it is. I try to learn something from everyone I play, get some strengths I didn't have before."
Sometimes she finds them in curious places. In another of her forthcoming films, a black comedy called Goodbye Lover, Arquette is a lustful, adulterous estate agent with an obsession with The Sound of Music and a taste for sex in a church organ loft, or with her partner handcuffed to the bed of one of the properties she's selling. "Sandra is very organised, so now I've started to tidy up my closet. White here and grey here, winter things here and spring things there. Before, it was just a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. So thank you for the organisational skills, Sandra!"
But then, when she's asked about the ankle-length leather skirt she's wearing, Arquette drifts back into vagueness: "It was designed by someone, uh, an Italian person... I packed badly this trip..." and she trails off into a giggle. These flinty characters seem at odds with her off-screen persona, and she admits to being ready for a change. "I like them better than 'Oh, please don't go!', but I feel like I've been exploring these woman for a long time, and I'd really like to play an ultra-innocent, goofy, silly comedic part."
Cage was her white knight, and their courtship was the stuff of Hollywood myth: a chance meeting in a delicatessen when Arquette was 18; a kiss which gave her beard burn, followed by Cage's instantaneous proposal. She sent him on a courtly quest to prove his love, involving such impossible grails as an autograph by the reclusive writer JD Salinger and a black orchid. When Cage threatened to succeed, albeit by cheating (he spray-painted a purple flower), they went their separate ways, each producing a child by another lover, though neither of them married. Then, years later, they ran into each other again. Arquette put the question this time and they were wed in 1995.
Unlike many other high-profile Hollywood couples, they both come from show business dynasties. "I think it's hereditary. I have four siblings, all actors," says Arquette, who, for years, worked in the shadow of her better-known big sister, Rosanna. "My parents were actors, my grandparents were actors, my great-grandparents were actors. I think Noah must have had a pair of performers on the ark to entertain his family, and those were my ancestors." But, whereas Cage's clan, the Coppolas, is said to be as byzantine and fiercely competitive as the Corleones in The Godfather, Arquette, raised on a hippie commune in Virginia, says her family is free-wheeling and supportive. "We don't criticise each other. There's too many people willing to do that already."
Has she ever regretted becoming an actress? "I've felt a lot more than I think I would have let myself feel otherwise. But it can be very painful to be that open all the time. I've had people saying, 'We want you to take off your clothes'. What kind of business is it where someone can tell you to do that? But then," she adds with a grin, "I guess it's the same in life, because some guys are going to want you to take your clothes off too."
Arquette toiled away for years in crummy teen pictures, including Prayer of the Rollerboys and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, before True Romance - scripted by the then ultra-hip Quentin Tarantino - paved the way for her career breakthrough. After then the roles got more interesting and she worked with such respected indie directors as Tim Burton (in Ed Wood), John Boorman (Beyond Rangoon), David Lynch (Lost Highway) and David O Russell (Flirting with Disaster).
She seems to have been caught unaware by celebrity: "I'd be meeting someone at a restaurant, book a table in her name and get told they were full. Then I'd arrive and suddenly there was one free," she says with an air of genuine amazement. "Before I met Nic, I had friends for whom it was a problem that I was better known than they were. Now I'm glad it's the other way round. Anyway, men need more attention than women."
The two will act together for the first time in Martin Scorsese's new film, Bringing out the Dead, which opens later this year. Cage's character is a burned-out New York paramedic who starts seeing ghosts, while Arquette plays a patient's daughter: "My father has a heart attack - that's how we meet, though we don't have a love affair. In real life my father was in hospital, so I'd be so sad all day thinking about that. I'd fly back home to Los Angeles to see him and he'd be trying to pull his tubes out. Then I'd go back to work, sit in a hospital, hold a guy's hand, calling him dad and watching him try to pull his tubes out.
"It was very disturbing the way the two things were moving along together until, right before the father in the movie died, my dad started to get a little better. Sometimes I would just lay down and cry and cry. It was nice to be with Nic through that because it was a hard time. It was great watching him work, but we were also very formal with each other. We'd go to the set in different cars, have our own make-up rooms, go to lunch separately, go home alone, and then we'd meet and say, 'Hi, how did it go?'" Cage, in his turn, says, rather sweetly, "The light of my day was to come home and see her."
Finally, a propos of nothing in particular, Arquette starts to describe, at enormous length and in great detail, a nightmare about being pursued around a house by a life-sized doll of a Native American. "Then I turned around and said, no, I'm going to chase it. I leaped into a car and I jumped through the window and became one-dimensional strips of light." Coming from her, it made sense at the time - sort of - and no doubt it's normal for film stars to dream about being turned into light. Arquette certainly has a luminous and ethereal quality, though there's not much one-dimensional about her.
The Hi-Lo Country opens on July 23. The Goodbye Lover is due out in the autumn.
