大象传媒

In her 大象传媒 Radio 4 podcast Young Again, journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Actor Minnie Driver talks about her eventful life, including the time, aged 11, when she was left to fend for herself in Miami, and the difficult experience of going to the Oscars with a broken heart. Here are seven things we learned.

1. She was almost taken from her mum as a child

Minnie had an atypical childhood. She says, “My parents weren’t married. My mother and father loved each other very much, and had me and my sister, but it was a complicated set-up.” Minnie’s father was married to someone else while in a relationship with Minnie’s mother.

“When my parents split up – this was 1976, the first year that women could get a mortgage without a male co-signing – my sister and I were made Wards of the Court, because our parents weren’t married…The judge gave my mother this impossible set of tasks that she had to achieve within seven weeks to maintain custody of us: she had to be married, own her own house and have us in school.”

“She somehow did it,” continues Minnie. “You would think that it was 1876. It was absurd… She sold everything she owned and bought this tiny crofter’s cottage in the middle of Hampshire that didn’t have an outside loo… It was quite an adventure.”

2. Her dad sent her to Miami alone when she was 11

Minnie remembers a difficult holiday with her father and his new young girlfriend. Struggling with her feelings, Minnie “tormented my stepmother, who really didn’t deserve it, and upset my father”. Fed up with her, Minnie’s father put her on a flight to Miami, where she was left in the city all on her own. She was 11.

“It’s nuts,” she says. “Nothing bad happened, which… is what makes it kind of a great story, but the idea that an 11-year-old was on their own in Miami, in 1981.” She laughs about it now but also recognises the weirdness. “For me, those are the best stories: humorous but also deeply kind of disturbing.”

3. Who Do You Think You Are? helped her understand her father

Minnie’s father was a pilot in World War II. She says that experience severely affected him, but she didn’t realise how much until she went on the show Who Do You Think You Are?, on which celebrities dig into their family history.

“He really did suffer from PTSD his entire life,” she says. “Any emotional situation… triggered that. I didn’t understand that until I did Who Do You Think You Are? and understood the war he had, because he never talked about it.” She wishes she could discuss it with him. “I would love to be able to talk to him about it and say there’s no shame in any of it. There’s only the experience of a very, very young man in a really terrifying war.”

4. Performing always came easily to her

Asked if acting came from a need to feel seen, Minnie says, “I wonder if we’re all doing that? Every person wants to be seen.” She has always loved performing and says it’s “as normal to me as eating breakfast”. Her love of it began with a school play.

“I remember being in front of this audience for the first time and I could feel the power I had in that moment… They’re not thinking about their problems, their mortgage, their relationships. They’re all in this shared space and I was there affecting the way they felt.” She says, “It felt like a good power, and that felt amazing.”

5. She was heartbroken at the Oscars

In 1997, Minnie co-starred in the film Good Will Hunting, alongside Matt Damon, who also became her off-screen boyfriend. Both were nominated for Oscars. They broke up shortly before the ceremony and Damon started dating Winona Ryder. It made for a challenging night.

“Let’s take it to a level everyone can recognise,” says Minnie. “It was like going to the big school dance and seeing the boy you were just with, who you loved, with someone else. And there are millions of cameras and people are watching.” Damon won that night, for screenwriting. “[The camera] cut to me looking at that and, I mean, the devastation on that girl’s face is just awful.”

However, she took her mum, dad and sister, and says it was one of their strongest times as a family. “They were titans on that night. It was, ‘No, we are the scaffolding around all of this. There will be no falling apart. There will be no tears.’”

6. She doesn’t regret speaking up for herself

Minnie says she used to be depicted in the press as difficult for “querying things that if a man had queried them there would be no question.” She remembers being portrayed as “throwing a strop” for questioning safety on one set.

She says things have improved now and the only advice she’d give her young self is to “allow other people to amplify your voice. Being the loudest voice in the room sometimes works against you, even if you’re absolutely correct and righteous. I would go back and say: use the people around you to be your voice.”

7. Her English teacher changed her life

Asked who had the biggest effect on her life, Minnie says her son, but also her school English teacher. “All the things in me that other people found problematic, he saw as deeply creative, driven and interesting. He gave that to me.” It’s always stayed with her. “Throughout my life, I have believed what the media said… but always there in my pocket was what I know he saw in me. That’s what I’ve always returned to, fashioning my interests and my career and creativity from that place, not from believing the nonsense that people tell women they are.”