had a separate glamorous lifestyle in Barbados,
but one not suited to young children. She
recalls when she was 11 giving one of his new
young girlfriends a hard time at his house in
Barbados and being sent away, put on a plane,
on her own, to Miami, where she checked
in alone at the Fontainebleau, like a real-life
version of Eloise, the storybook child who
lives alone in the Plaza Hotel (“OK, honey,
listen, lock the door after I leave and I’ll be on
the front desk at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning
if you need me,” the shocked woman on the
Fontainebleau reception told Driver).
It is difficult to think how her childhood
could not have informed in some way her
constant yearning to find love, a sort of
desperate seeking for something out of
reach, which encompassed acting but was
not confined to it.
That first very public break-up with
Matt Damon seemed to set her on a course,
at the very least in the tabloid press. Her
mother had told her to love Damon “with
loose hands”, but actually she had held on
with a vice-like grip, totally in love, intoxicated
by the seeming coming together of all parts of
her life: fame, success at something she loved,
recognition, romantic love, as it was for him
too. “It was unsustainable. You can’t have two
people doing the same thing on the same
trajectory at the same moment... It’s not
possible for that ball to continue at the same
velocity. Something is going to crack.
“I wonder if I would have responded
differently to the break-up if I’d been more...”
she trails off.
Secure? “From where I am at 52, I now
think of 26 as being a baby. I think it would
have been a lot for anyone. And the emotional
chaos of my childhood, whenever I think
about that... It made being famous more
difficult, being emotionally slightly untethered
and not grounded, but it also created the
journey where I had to figure out how to
ground myself, and never expect that an
external force was going to do that for me.
I would not trade that now. When I remember
my mum and my dad, there was as much
hilarity as there was this emotional chaos and
I’m not sure that I would trade it [either].”
As she was dying, Driver’s mother
apologised to her for being a bad parent. It
was an unnecessary apology by then. “Mum
and I had worked through all the painful
stuff. It took a lifetime to do that, but it was
so beautiful. Yeah, she could be defensive,
absolutely, like any human, but we had an
evolving relationship. She was not the same
person she was when I was a little child as
when I had Henry. There were aspects ofThe Times Magazine 25speculation in the press). There was no
mystery. Their affair was brief and he was
in the process of wrapping his head around
becoming a father. Now it all works very well;
it just took a while. “I thank him every day
for [making me a mother],” she says of her
co-parent, Timothy J Lea.
There has been another significant
development too. After a very long history of
unsuccessful romantic relationships over the
years (truth but not delivered as invective),
some high-profile (Josh Brolin, Harrison Ford
and the late Taylor Hawkins, drummer in
the Foo Fighters) and some not, she found
romantic and “as near to unconditional love
as possible” when she least expected it. Since
2018, her partner has been Addison O’Dea, an
American film-maker. They met at a party, but
properly when he agreed to help her navigate
a boat towards the shore during the Malibu
fires that threatened to engulf her trailer.
Living in London was never on the cards,
but she has a more fluid approach to life now.
“All I ever wanted was marriage, was [that
feeling] that you had been chosen and you
had chosen this other person. When I met
him, I was so done with all relationships. I had
been really happy with someone who I had
known from the age of 17 who ended up being
such a god-awful shit.
“I’m [now] with a person who is just so
anti-marriage I can’t tell you,” she says. “But
I know I will be with him for ever. I know that
we have this kind of love that is different from
any relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s because
both of us came into the relationship with no
expectation of it being anything other than a
great friendly connection. We grew with no
expectation of the other.”
On the jacket of the book, above a
childhood picture of her, peak Marc Bolan,
there is the line, “How things not working
out actually worked out in the end.” Because
for a while it looked as if things might not
be working out for Driver – the hustle of the
career, the lovers who didn’t work out, what
she calls “the f***ing grind”. This seemed all
the more harsh because it followed on from
a very exciting but unreal period of life, the
appearance that it really was working out by
a definition of success that she realised only
much later on was an illusion.We meet three days before the first
anniversary of her mother’s death from liver
cancer, a sudden, brutally swift period in
lockdown London during which Driver
spent a lot of time lying on the floor of her
mother’s hospital room. Diagnosis came when
her mother saw her eyes were yellow while
putting on her mascara. The disease was
swift. Grief is barely below the surface. When
I bring up Gaynor Churchward, Driver begins
to cry. “I cried all day yesterday,” she says.“It’s terrible. But you know what, I’ve ceased
to be ashamed or frightened by grief because
it doesn’t let up. It takes a different form.
Your life grows around it. That grief and
incapacitation I felt over Mum dying, it forced
me to look at what I wanted to pursue in
my life, and that is being creative... and only
working with people I love and not pursuing
relationships or stuff that doesn’t bear fruit.”
Her childhood in London, then Hampshire,
with visits to Barbados, was complicated.
Her father, Ronnie Driver, once a wealthy
businessman but who eventually went
bankrupt, had a separate family running
simultaneously with his relationship with
Driver’s mother. Her mother finally left him
and, constrained by a stipulation of the family
court judge that she could only have custody
of her children if married (shocking as it
is to contemplate), quickly wed a man the
young Minnie did not like. She agreed to go
to boarding school to escape, but immediately
regretted it.
“One of the three big regrets of my life,”
she says. “The others are leaving my British
and American agents for Matt’s agent, and
also a string of men.”
She tells a story about her stepfather
slapping her around the face and her using
a marker pen to draw an outline around the
mark on her cheek, as a visible reminder.
It is an early indication of how she would
not take unfairness lightly. She went on
to speak up on movie sets about indignities
and in the process earned herself a reputation
for being “difficult”.
Years later, her mother split up from him.
Driver found out about her father’s existing
married status around the age of 12, when her
mother sought to justify to her the reasons
for her decision to leave him. Her late father‘THE EMOTIONAL CHAOS OF MY CHILDHOOD
MADE BEING FAMOUS MORE DIFFICULT’With Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in 1998ALAMY