Paula Patton

Paula Patton was the daughter of Joyce (Vanraden) and Charles Patton. Her father is African-American , and her mother who is caucasian is of German, English, and Dutch ancestry. Her family lived right across from the 20th Century Fox lot when she was growing up and she was a huge fan of movies in her early days. Her mother, too, who loved good films taught in a school, and her father was a lawyer. Paula claims she was able to get away from her mother by pretending to be a different person as when she was a kid. It's not surprising that she was involved in Hamilton Magnet Arts High School's high school productions. Her favorite role was "Abigail" from "The Crucible". After graduation from the University Southern California's summer program she pursued film studies and was given a 3-month assignment to create documentaries for PBS. This led to her working as a production assistant on TV documentariesand for Howie Mandel's talk show. Then she began producing documentaries for Medical Diaries (2000) airing on Discovery Health Channel. Paula claims she enjoys doing what she loves, but she is still aspiring to be a performer. She was almost immediately successful and, within three years, had played the lead roles in major movies, Hitch (2005) and Idlewild (2006) and the female lead in Deja Vu (2006) opposite Denzel Washington.