The Arquette Family: All About Patricia, David and Their 3 Siblings

The Arquette family has one of the most storied legacies in Hollywood — thanks, in part, to the successful careers of Patricia Arquette and her younger brother David Arquette.

But the brother and sister also have three additional siblings — Richmond, Rosanna and Alexis — who have worked as actors on the big screen, too. Acting in the Arquette family dates back two generations: Their father, actor Lewis Arquette, was best known for his role on the 1970s television show The Waltons and their grandfather, Cliff Arquette, was a famous radio host and comedian throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

Patricia followed in their footsteps, winning an Emmy for her starring role on the television show Medium, earning an Oscar for her role in 2014’s Boyhood and nabbing a Golden Globe in 2020 for Hulu’s The Act.

Her brother, David, rose to fame with his starring role in the Scream slasher films and acting in Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore. His relationships have also been the subject of media attention: The actor had a high-profile, 11-year marriage to Courteney Cox; the couple share a daughter Coco Arquette. David then wed for the second time in April 2015 to Christina McLarty and they later welcomed two children.

But David and Patricia aren’t the only Arquettes to find on-screen success: Siblings Richmond, Rosanna and Alexis (who died in 2016) have all had decades-long acting careers in Hollywood.

“Performing is in our blood,” Patricia wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2017 about her famous family. “Acting was a part of everyday life … You got props in my house if you said something interesting or funny.”

From their humble beginnings on a Virginia commune to their activism, here’s everything to know about the Arquette siblings: Rosanna, Richmond, Patricia, Alexis and David Arquette.

Their grandfather was famous comedian Charley Weaver

The Arquette siblings’ history in the entertainment industry dates back to their grandfather Cliff, who was better known by his stage name, Charley Weaver.

Cliff first began his career in show business as a musician, leaving high school to launch a band and play gigs in Hollywood as a teen. In the 1930s, he found success as a radio broadcaster — at one point, performing on 13 daily radio stations throughout Chicago, according to The New York Times. His comedic persona was born out of his radio performances, and he eventually brought the character to television before he retired in 1955 to pursue another passion — woodcarving.

But Cliff would be called out of retirement shortly thereafter, by none other than Jack Paar of The Tonight Show.

“Everyone was watching The Jack Paar Show, because it was just this huge phenomenon,” Patricia said during an appearance on The Tonight Show in April 2022. “He was watching one night and Jack said, ‘You know who used to crack me up? Charley Weaver. What happened to him? What happened to Charley Weaver?’ ”

Cliff wrote Paar after hearing that, and the television host invited him on the show. From there, Cliff, as Weaver, became a regular on The Tonight Show throughout the 1950s. Then, when NBC launched its game show Hollywood Squares in 1966, Weaver occupied the lower left square on the tic-tac-toe board — and remained there until his death in 1974.

Cliff’s talents, which earned him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, helped influence the later generations of the Arquette family. “My grandfather, Charley Weaver, played trumpet at speakeasies and then did live radio,” Patricia told The New Yorker in 2022. “So we grew up with a lot of artists, and it’s how we played as kids. We did story-theater skits.”

The Arquettes spent part of their childhood on a commune in Virginia

Lewis, Cliff’s son and an actor in his own right, and his wife Brenda “Mardi” Nowak had five children together: Rosanna (born in 1959), Richmond (1963), Patricia (1968), Alexis (1969) and David (1971). Both Lewis and Mardi were artists which eventually led them to seek out life on a commune in Virginia.

In the early 1970s, when the Arquette siblings were young, their parents moved them to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to join the Skymont Commune. The Arquettes lived in a cabin on the commune with no bathroom, running water or electricity and the entire family slept in one room, Patricia recalled to The Wall Street Journal in 2017.

“They wanted to raise us in a spiritual, utopian society away from the rat race and closer to nature,” Patricia told The Wall Street Journal.

And for Richmond, their time on the commune was positive. “I was surrounded by friends, all the time, and we had a lot of freedom,” he told Virginia Living in 2015. “We swam in the creek. We swam in the river.”

But Patricia also had memories of “intense poverty” at Skymont — including having to hitchhike “for hours” and going days without shoes. At times, the actress said they relied on government assistance for food. “I still feel I have the heart of a poor child and an intimate understanding of what that experience is like,” Patricia told The Wall Street Journal.

Despite the tough conditions, the commune’s simple way of life helped to foster Patricia’s creativity from a young age. “Living there also helped me develop a love of art,” she said. “Bands played every night, and we knew all the songs. People created things, since no one had any money.”

The Arquettes spent four years on the commune. From there, they moved to Chicago before settling in Los Angeles.

The siblings had a “turbulent childhood”

Several of the Arquette siblings have spoken about the challenges of their upbringing — which allegedly included physical abuse and substance abuse. “We had a turbulent childhood, but also a childhood filled with love,” David told The Guardian in 2020. In the same interview, he also said his mother was “abusive.”

In a 2011 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Patricia and Rosanna provided more details about the environment the siblings grew up in. “Our father was an actor, mother was a poet, so there was a lot of drama in the house,” Rosanna said, recounting times when they say their mother was physically abusive.

Patricia and Rosanna also detailed their father’s substance abuse issues, which allegedly included problems with marijuana and alcohol. “When you grow up in that kind of family, it is a family disease,” Rosanna said. “It affects everybody.”

“It’s like a minefield,” Patricia added. “You never knew what you were going to get.”

Despite the volatility the Arquette children allegedly endured during their childhood, both of their parents addressed their issues as they got older. Their father, Lewis, got sober in his later years and their mother, Mardi, became a therapist. “My mother, there was nothing but forgiveness and love at the end of her life,” Rosanna recalled.

“I had a love-hate relationship with her,” Patricia told The Wall Street Journal about her mother. “I didn’t recognize then that she was a tremendous force for good in our household. No matter what happened at home, her kids meant everything to her.”

Their parents didn’t want them to become actors

Rosanna rose to fame in the 1980s and ’90s, with appearances in films including Desperately Seeking Susan, The Big Blue and Pulp Fiction. And in 2017, she was one of the first women to come forward and claim that she was sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein — and her career in Hollywood was allegedly affected as a result.

In a piece that ran in The New Yorker in October 2017, Rosanna detailed an encounter that happened in the early 1990s when she went to retrieve a script from the producer at the Beverly Hills Hotel. According to her account, he greeted her in a bathrobe and demanded a neck massage. When she pulled away, Weinstein then allegedly grabbed her hand and pulled it towards his genitals.

Rosanna rejected Weinstein, telling him “I will never do that,” according to The New Yorker. Weinstein allegedly told her she was making a mistake.

As a result, Rosanna said that Weinstein “made things very difficult for me for years.” But despite that, the actress does not mourn what her career could have been — and instead focuses on the positive effects of her speaking out.

“This is my karma. It’s for the greater good that it happened to me, because what has become more important in my life is the activism, and being … one of the voices for the voiceless,” she told The Guardian in 2019.

Activism runs in the family’s blood

Rosanna isn’t the only family member to take activism seriously — the Arquettes have been championing social causes dating back to the civil rights movement. Their mother, Mardi, was both a civil rights and an anti-war activist in the 1960s and ’70s, bringing her five children along with her to protests.

“I will never forget the day I met Martin Luther King,” Rosanna told Harper’s Bazaar UK in 2021. “It was at an anti-Vietnam protest that my mom had organized, and I was in the back of a truck with him. She had painted on my bare chest, ‘Stop the war kill no more’, and he asked my name. I told him my name, and he just says, ‘Someone put a shirt on that little girl.’ ”

Patricia shared similar stories of their childhood with The New Yorker. “I grew up with this mother who was an activist. She was a white woman, but she marched for civil rights,” Patricia said. “I volunteered with people of all different colors, fighting for all different people, whether straight people fighting for gay rights or Black women fighting for progressive candidates.”

The Arquettes have continued to carry the torch since their mother’s death in 1997. Rosanna made a documentary in 2002 called Searching for Debra Winger, about the shortage of roles in Hollywood for older women. When Patricia won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2015, she used her acceptance speech to campaign for equal pay for women.

“It’s high time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” she said, to the cheers of Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez in the audience.

Patricia followed up her speech with action, creating an equal pay platform with U.N. Women in 2017.

In addition, their sister Alexis was a pioneering transgender activist until her death in 2016. The family has continued her work through the Alexis Arquette Family Foundation and The Alexis Project, which provides specialized medical and mental health staff for the LGBTQ+ community.

“This is in our DNA,” Rosanna told The Guardian about the family’s activist work.

Alexis died in 2016

On Sept. 11, 2016, Alexis died at the age of 47. The cause of death was cardiac arrest as a result of HIV, which Alexis had been living with for 29 years.

The surviving Arquette siblings remembered their sister in a statement shared with PEOPLE.

“Alexis was a brilliant artist and painter, a singer, an entertainer and an actor,” the statement read, also noting that she starred in films like Pulp Fiction, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Of Mice and Men and The Wedding Singer. “Her career was cut short, not by her passing, but by her decision to live her truth and her life as a transgender woman … She was a vanguard in the fight for understanding and acceptance for all trans people.”

The statement continued: “We learned what real bravery is through watching her journey of living as a trans woman. We came to discover the one truth – that love is everything.”

Alexis, who was one of the first transgender activists in Hollywood, left a legacy that her brother and sisters now carry on in her memory. The Arquettes, who were “fiercely defensive” of Alexis throughout her transition and beyond, launched the Alexis Arquette Foundation (now called The Alexis Project) in 2018 to continue the positive work their sister did for the transgender community.

“Alexis was our hero and it’s a huge wound, an open gaping wound, in our family,” Rosanna told PEOPLE. “That’s why I started the Alexis Arquette Family Foundation on behalf of us all, so that we could do good things in the world under Alexis’s name.”

At a September 2024 event for The Alexis Project, David told PEOPLE that Alexis’ decision to come out as a trans woman was “really tough.”

“She was a fighter, and the roles just dropped off. It didn’t allow Alexis to work as much as she would’ve liked to, but like you said, it did help open the door for people in the future,” he said.

He continued, “I was just so proud of her, and I’m still so proud of her, so honored to have been her sibling. Growing up with Alexis, Alexis taught me so much about art and music and fashion and humor and loyalty and kindness and friendship and family.”

Rosanna has been married four times and has a daughter

Rosanna has been married four times: to director Tony Greco, composer James Newton Howard, restaurateur John Sidel and investment banker Todd Morgan.

The actress also has a daughter named Zoë Bleu from her marriage to Sidel. Her child is a rising actress who most recently appeared in 2022’s Signs of Love.

“She’s really talented and very gifted,” Rosanna told PEOPLE about Zoë. “The truth is she’s quite the little wise owl and I could use taking advice from her sometimes. She’s quite a character and I love her very much. She’s a good kid.”

Richmond has appeared in films like Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Richmond, the second eldest Arquette sibling, is also one of the most private. But he still works in the family profession like his brother and sisters, appearing in nearly 80 films and television shows dating back to 1993.

Some of Richmond’s most notable roles came in 2007’s psychological thriller Zodiac, 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the romantic comedy Made of Honor that same year. He is also the delivery man in the infamous final scene of 1995’s Se7en.