Patricia Arquette’s new US television true crime series, The Act, is as unsettling as it is fascinating. She portrays Dee Dee Blanchard, a mother now understood to have been suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who faked her daughter Gypsy’s serious ailments, confining her to a wheelchair and subjecting her to unnecessary procedures and medications for more than 20 years. In real life, Dee Dee was murdered by Gypsy’s boyfriend and co-conspirator, Nicholas Godejohn, in 2015. Joey King (Gypsy) and Chloë Sevigny (neighbour Mel) are excellent in The Act, but it’s Arquette’s Dee Dee who holds the eye – one moment, a “devoted” mother, the next, brooding and calculating.
“I’d always been fascinated by Munchausen by proxy,” says Arquette, 51, when we meet at a central London hotel. “It was terrifying to me that parents would do this to their kids. I didn’t know this specific case, though. My kids did. They went: “No, don’t play that lady!” I said: ‘Guys, I’m just an actor. I’m not going to start coming home and giving you medication.’”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HE83Q7
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