Focus Features

Lone Scherfig’s romance One Day focuses on the emotional ups and downs between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), a young couple who meet as students and friends in 1988 and end as something so much more years later. But while Emma and Dex are the film’s focus, other characters, like Dexter’s mother Alison Mayhew (Patricia Clarkson), are essential to the story and to the couple’s future. In some ways, Clarkson’s character provides the film’s moral center, if not simply its moral that “one day” is all we have. In One Day, Clarkson adds psychological depth and emotional color to the film, without in anyway detracting from the main drama. It’s a role that Clarkson has perfected –– a character actor that is essential to the film.

Clarkson with her mother and father

Born in New Orleans on December 29, 1959, just a few days before the sixties began, Clarkson would grow up to represent two worlds––the refined and honorable south of her youth and the cultural sophistication of her life today. Born into a household of a strong mother––her mother Jacquelyn (Brechtel) Clarkson is a local politician ––and four smart, successful sisters, she did not lack for role models. Clarkson later joked to theHollywoodInterview that her poor father, Arthur ("Buzz") Clarkson, a public health administrator, “lived in a house of six women and two female dogs. I mean…but I think he kind of loved it! …He has male grandchildren now, so the estrogen count that he had to live with has petered out somewhat.” And while she grew up proud of who she was, she also delighted in being other people. “Since the time I was 13 or 14 when I was first involved with theatre, I really just loved transforming,” She recounted to Screenwize, “I loved entering another character and taking that journey – entering a different life for a while.”

While she preformed in high school, and then studied drama at Louisiana State University, and then later Fordham University, Clarkson’s drama career really began when she entered the MFA program at Yale’s School of Drama. Her skill in capturing characters was certainly honed through her appearance in the school’s productions of plays like “Twelfth Night", "The Misanthrope," and "Pacific Overtures." But she got even more experience through her day-to-day class exercises. “I spent three years acting against type, which stretched me and shaped me and made me malleable and pliable,” she told Screenwize in 2009. “After playing classic leading lady roles like “Hedda Gabler” as an undergraduate, I got to Yale and wore more fat suits and wigs than you can imagine. I played the Bard in “Pericles”, and I played a 300-pound woman, and I shared a fat suit with Dylan Baker.” Ready to play skinny (or fat), she took to the New York stage, receiving high marks for her performance in such works as the 1986 staging of John Guare’s "The House of Blue Leaves" and the 1989 staging of Richard Greenberg’s "Eastern Standard."

Clarkson in High Art

In 1986, Clarkson began her film career playing the wife of G-Man Eliott Ness (Kevin Costner) in Brian DePalma’s 1987 The Untouchables. Her smoky voice and radiant good looks brought her plenty of small roles in both television and film. She appeared regularly on TV dramas like “Murder One” and “Law and Order.” In 1987, she was cast opposite Clint Eastwood in The Dead Pool. That same year, her career changed for the better when first-time director Lisa Cholodenko cast her to play the ex-model, heroin-addicted German lesbian lover in her 1998 drama High Art. While such a role could’ve easily slid into a “Saturday Night Live” caricature, Clarkson molded the woman’s eccentricities to create an empathetic human figure. Robert Ebert noted in his review, “Patricia Clarkson succeeds in creating a complete, complex character without ever overplaying the stoned behavior (she's like Fassbinder's Petra von Kant on heroin instead of booze).” Clarkson told the Hollywood Interview a decade later, “That film changed everything for me. … I loved the part, although I’m not German, I’m not gay and I’ve never even smoked pot! But Lisa Cholodenko had faith in me that I would transform and that I understood Greta in some way.”