Paula Patton

Paula Patton is the daughter of Joyce (Vanraden) Patton and Charles Patton. Her father is African American and her mother is caucasian. She is of German, English, Dutch and English family ancestry. Her family lived right across from the 20th Century Fox lot when she was young and she was a lover of movies in her early days. Her mother, who also loved good films, was a schoolteacher, as was her father, an attorney. Paula states that as an adult she would escape by "pretending to appear to be someone else" so it was not a surprise that she acted in plays for high school at Hamilton Magnet Arts High School. Her favorite role was "Abigail" from "The Crucible". She continued her studies at the University of Southern California, where she completed a summer course in film. It was during this time that she was granted a three-month task to create documentaries on PBS. In the end, she was able to work as a production assistant on television documentaries as well as on Howie Mandel's talk show. In the following years, she was a producer of documentary segments for Medical Diaries (2000 on Discovery Health Channel). Paula now professes that she was happy with what she was doing but her ambitions remained the same as when she was a child, and she began acting classes and changed gears to become a performer. She was a star within a matter of days and was in Hitch (2006), Idlewild (2006) and Deja Vu (2006) as the female role in the film.