Paula Patton

Paula Patton was the daughter of Joyce (Vanraden), and Charles Patton. Her father is African American, while her mother is caucasian and has German, English and Dutch ancestry. Her family lived across the street from the 20th Century Fox lot when she was growing up , and she was a fan of films from her earliest days. Her mother, who loved good films taught in a school, and her father was a lawyer. Paula states that as a girl she would escape by "pretending to play a different character" therefore it wasn't the case that she appeared in plays for high school at Hamilton Magnet Arts High School. Her favorite character was "Abigail" from "The Crucible". After graduation from the University Southern California's summer school, she took film classes and was offered a three-month project to make documentaries for PBS. Then, she was hired as a production assistant on documentaries on TV and Howie Mandel's talk-show. Her career progressed to producing documentary segments for Medical Diaries (2000) airing on Discovery Health Channel. Paula claims she enjoys her job, however, she still dreams of being a performer. It was a quick success and within three years of her debut, she had appeared in part in two major feature films: Hitch (2005) and Idlewild (2006) and was the female leading lady in Deja Vu (2006) opposite Denzel Washington.