The Charming Love between Beauty and the Buffoon: Courteney Cox and David Arquette

Hollywood is a strange place.  While celebrities hook up on an almost daily basis, it is still possible to shock the world with an unlikely celebrity marriage.  People’s jaws dropped when they learned that Academy Award winning actress and one of America’s most popular actresses, Julia Roberts, was marrying the respected country singer, Lyle Lovett.  Although Lovett is an accomplished musician, many people couldn’t understand why Roberts was marrying somebody that couldn’t match the high beauty standards of her.  It was perhaps this mean spirit scrutiny that led to the dissolution of that marriage.

One could argue that Hollywood works like a high school.  If the top movie stars are the jocks and prom queens of the school, television stars are like sophomores and juniors who are waiting to ascend to the throne.  In the 1990s, there were very few television stars that shone as bright as Courteney Cox.  With her stunning figure and cherubic face, Courteney Cox was quickly becoming a star in her own right due to the overwhelming success of the ensemble sitcom, “Friends.”  Much like Cheers in the 1980s, Friends was becoming an iconic show that was universally loved.  In addition, Courteney Cox was attempting to use her television fame as a springboard to movie stardom.  She would find success playing a pesky reporter in the extraordinarily popular Scream trilogy.  It was while working on this movie that Cox would meet her future husband, David Arquette.

If Courteney Cox represented good old fashioned Hollywood glamour, David Arquette represented the weird side of Hollywood.  He would often make eccentric and somewhat buffoonish appearances on talk shows while using this persona as a way to get acting jobs.  His movie characters could be described as being dimwitted and somewhat juvenile.  A frequent star in B-movies such as “8 Legged Freaks” and “Ready to Rumble,” one could argue that the crowning heights of Arquette’s career has been his reign as WCW Heavyweight Champion during his gimmicky reign as a professional wrestler.

Perhaps it is this playfulness that attracted Cox to Arquette.  Regardless of what it was that brought these two seemingly polar opposites together, it seems to be true love.  The couple married on June 12, 1999 and would go on to be one of the more enduring celebrity marriages of their time.  Although Courtney Cox and David Arquette may not be one of the most famous celebrity marriages right now, they are one of the quirkiest.  Many people find that this celebrity couple to be one of the cutest celebrity marriages although they are also admittedly baffled to why these two are together.  However, you don’t have to be from Hollywood to know that sometimes love doesn’t make sense and we will examine the unlikely celebrity marriage of Courteney Cox and David Arquette.

For an actress that rose to prominence portraying a New Yorker, you may be surprised to learn that Courteney Cox is from the south.  Born on June 15, 1964 to businessman, Richard L. Cox and Courteney Bass, in Birmingham, Alabama, Courteney Bass Cox was born into affluence.  The youngest of four children, Cox was raised in the exclusive society town, Mountain Brook, Alabama.  Although her parents would divorce when she was 10 years old, Courteney Cox would go on to have an All American childhood.

While she attended Mountain Brook Highschool, Courteney Cox would excel as a cheerleader, tennis player, and swimmer.  She would attend Mount Vernon College for Women where she studied architecture and interior design.  However, she would drop out a year later to enter the modeling world.  She would sign with the prestigious Ford modeling agency in New York City where she would take a number of acting classes to further her career.

It wouldn’t take long for this Southern beauty to be noticed.  In 1984, people throughout the country couldn’t help notice Cox as she appeared in the Bruce Springsteen music video for “Dancing in the Dark.”  This hugely popular music video in which Bruce Springsteen interrupts his concert to pull up Cox on stage to dance with him made Courteney Cox a recognizable face.  She would use her newfound cache to break down a barrier in her appearance in the 1985 advertising campaign for Tampax tampons.  It was during these commercials that Courteney Cox would become the first person to say the word “period” on American television.

From there, Cox would attempt to break into acting but struggled with less than great roles.  She would appear in such forgettable movies as “Masters of the Universe,” and “Cocoon: The Return.”  Her most notable role would be as the girlfriend to Michael J. Fox’s character on the popular 1980s sitcom, “Family Ties.”  Although her career prospects seemed bleak at the time, Courteney Cox would find success in 1994 on both the big screen and small screen.

Courteney Cox was cast as the love interest to Jim Carrey’s first starring role, the comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”  The movie was seen as a bit of a risk as Carrey had yet to prove his success as a movie star despite earning serious praise as a sketch comic on  “In Living Color.”  The movie would turn out to be one of the biggest hits in 1994 and would be the start of Jim Carrey’s lucrative movie career.  At the same time, Courteney Cox was cast on a promising new sitcom called “Friends” that would become a massive hit.

Although Courteney Cox would not be successful in transitioning from a TV star to a movie star, she is still a well known celebrity in Hollywood.  After taking a break to give birth to a son, Cox has made a blistering return to television.  Unlike the friendly and lovable character that she portrayed on Friends, Courteney Cox plays an abrasive tabloid editor on the drama, Dirt.  Mixing her personal life with her professional life, Cox and Arquette would executive produce the show.

If Courteney Cox career seems to have stalled, it could be a reflection on her placing more importance on her personal life than on her career.  It would be while shooting the movie Scream that Courteney Cox would meet her future husband, David Arquette.  In the movie, Arquette was playing the somewhat clueless town police officer that strikes up an awkward romance with Cox’s character.  Off the set, life was imitating art as Cox and Arquette quietly began to date.  Although many people feel that Courteney Cox settled by marrying an actor that occupied a lower level of fame than Cox’s, one look at David Arquette’s life would reveal one of the most fascinating figures in Hollywood today.

Born on September 8, 1971 in a Buddhist commune in Winchester, Virginia, David James Arquette was born with acting literally in his blood.  His grandfather was comedian Cliff Arquette and his parents were both actors.  Born to Hollywood Squares mainstay, Cliff Arquette, and star of “Olga’s House of Shame,” Brenda “Mardi” Nowak, David Arquette grew up in a stimulating and somewhat eccentric environment.  His four siblings would go on to follow the family trade and become actors, with his sisters, Patricia and Rosanna going on to bigger success.  Rosanna Arquette would be immortalized in two classic anthems, Toto’s “Rosanna” and Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”

Although Arquette would follow in the family footsteps of acting, he would not really achieve great success.  He appeared in such forgettable titles as, “Halfway House,” “The Killing Box,” and “An Ambush of Ghosts.”  With his ability to do slapstick humor and his likeable but slighty odd persona, Arquette was able to establish a career as a character actor.  His biggest success would be in the Scream trilogy, although he would later star in B-movies like “8 Legged Freaks” and “Riding the Bullet.”

Acknowledging the fringe nature of his public persona, David Arquette would make the strange decision to promote his wrestling movie, “Ready to Rumble,” by actually wrestling in the World Championship Wrestling program.  Although Arquette initially thought this was a bad idea, he was eventually convinced to participate and would wind up winning the WCW World Heavyweight Championship on April 25, 2000.  Despite having a great deal doing this, David Arquette was proven right as many wrestling fans found this development preposterous and representative of the many bad decisions WCW would make as it barreled its way to irrelevance.

While David Arquette continues to make movies, he also seems to have placed more of a focus on his marriage to Courteney Cox.  After all, if you were married to Courteney Cox, wouldn’t you be trying to discover new ways to spend more time with your wife?  Arquette and Cox would begin dating in 1996 while they were shooting the movie “Scream.”  After some high profile romances with Michael Keaton and Counting Crows singer, Adam Duritz, Courteney Cox found love with the affable Arquette.  The two would eventually marry on June 12, 1999 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California.  The two had an Episcopalian ceremony and would add a bit of Arquette’s trademark quirk by wearing wedding rings that had the sentence, “A deal’s a deal” inscribed on them.

Although many people were skeptical about the long term nature of this celebrity marriage, the bond between Courteney Cox and David Arquette seems to be increasing by the day.  The two would have their first child on June 13, 2004 where the world was first introduced to Coco Riley Arquette.  Happily married, Cox and Arquette have begun to work together by appearing in a Coke commercial and executive producing Cox’s show, “Dirt” and the TBS series, “Daisy Does America.”

While you can see David Arquette on “In Case of Emergency” and Courteney Cox on “Dirt,” on the small screen, you can tell that the two are living a much more fulfilling life off screen.  This real life celebrity romance is just further proof that in Hollywood, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction!