Paula Patton

Paula Patton was the daughter of Joyce (Vanraden), and Charles Patton. Her father is African American, and her mother is caucasian and is of German, English and Dutch ancestry. Her family lived directly across the street from the 20th Century Fox lot as she grew up and she was a big movie buff from her early days. Her mother, a teacher and her father was a lawyer and were both avid fans of films. Paula states that as an teen she would get away from the world by "pretending to play a different character" and it shouldn't come as the case that she appeared in plays for high school at Hamilton Magnet Arts High School. Her favorite role was the one played by Abigail in "The Crucible". After finishing the University of Southern California's summer camp, she pursued film studies and was given a 3-month assignment to create documentaries on PBS. Then she was employed as a production assistant on television documentaries as well as Howie Mandel's talk show. She progressed to actually producing documentary segments for Medical Diaries (2000) airing on Discovery Health Channel. Paula declares she loves her work but her dream was still the same. She began acting classes and changed gears to become an actor. She was almost immediately successful and, within three years of her debut, she had appeared in part in two major feature films: Hitch (2005) and Idlewild (2006) and the female role in Deja Vu (2006) opposite Denzel Washington.