Prime-time princess
Courteney Cox
and class clown David Arquette is love
and alter-bound? What a Scream!
The same goony-eyed gaze that
Courteney Cox boyfriend on Friends – that was just the
expression on her face one day late August. But Cox wasn't acting
when she visited the set of 20th Century Fox's romantic comedy
Never Been Kissed to watch her real-life beau, David Arquette,
film a scene. “She had a big girlfriend smile on her face
and was pointing out David for her mom and sister,” says
Michelle Stephan, an extra on the film. “You could tell she
was closely watching everything he was doing and smiling the
whole time.” Get used to that grin. The 34-year-old actress,
who plays perennially single Monica on Friends, and Arquette, 27,
the impulsively wacky star of a string of independent films and
those scary AT&T ads, are engaged to be married following an
unlikely courtship of more than two years. “It's one of
those cases where opposites attract and complement each other in
wonderful ways,” says director Wes Craven, who watched Cox
and Arquette fall in love while making his blockbuster horror
fests Scream and Scream 2. Craven says Arquette “brought a
lot of excitement and a kind of mad whimsy to her life, and she
brought a rooted ness and a great amount of wisdom and love into
his.” Cox recently told Craven that a chair Arquette moved
into her sleekly decorated four-bedroom house in Brentwood, Calif.,
was in the shape of a giant hand: “And Courteney said, 'I
don't care. Before, if anybody had brought anything into my house
that didn't match, I'd have gone crazy. But now it's just all
seems kind of fun.'” Craven capitalized on the Cox-Arquette
mismatch by having their Screams characters –she played
ruthless TV reporter Gale Weathers to his bumbling deputy Dewey
Riley – kiss at the end of the sequel, a scene that made
audiences cheer. That chemistry carried over to real life, which
– on day Arquette popped the question-proved explosively.
The couple were vacation-
