Minnie Driver

Harvey Weinstein didn't fancy her and she was seen as “difficult” during her career peak – two things the actor is now very thankful for.

She was not the same person she was when I was a little child as when I had Henry. There were aspects of her that were the same, but she had evolved. You are adjacent to and subordinate to that boys’ club, and the myth of so many young women is believing that you have to fill the shape of the cookie cutter that is shaped like a dude as opposed to creating one that is shaped like a woman and being that.” She was so terrified of how to make it work alone as an actress in LA that during her pregnancy she placed a chair in her garden so that she had somewhere to sit when 3am anxiety set in. It was really messy and really public and really dramatic and that is a really good f…ing story.” She also read “You’re It”, the chapter Driver dedicates to examining her fame, her move to America, and the fallout from the breakup. 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 (“Okay, honey, listen, lock the door after I leave and I’ll be on the front desk at nine o’clock tomorrow morning if you need me,” the shocked woman on the Fontainebleau reception told Driver). 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].” She went on to speak up on movie sets about indignities and in the process earned herself a reputation for being “difficult”. 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. “One of the three big regrets of my life,” she says. 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 don’t bear fruit.” It is perhaps a less star-studded path than first intended, but Driver took it partly out of necessity and partly, she will explain, to be a good single mother to her son, now 12.