I'm no Minnie Spouse

Actor is over marriage dream

- PETER SHERIDAN

FOR much of her life Minnie Driver has longed for marriage, a family and a home.

But at 52, finally in a loving relationship, and with a 13-year-old son by a previous brief fling, the star of Good Will Hunting has come to the realisation that the “marriage thing”, as she calls it, probably won't happen for her.

"I've really always wanted to be married” she admits. “I thought it meant you were accepted or acceptable. It's taken a long time to unpick that.”

Her partner, screenwriter Addison O'Dea, at 42 is 10 years younger and does not want to tie the knot.

Now, she says, she has come to terms with that. “What I really want is to be with this man that I love now, forever," she says.

Driver's romantic longings are woven into her critically acclaimed new memoir, Managing Expectations, which was published this week.

The actress, who grew up in England and Barbados, and had doomed relationships with Harrison Ford, Josh Brolin, and the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, reveals she has been shaped by those she has loved and lost.

“My parents separated when I was six, but at the age of 12, I discovered that they had never been married and that throughout their relationship my father was married to somebody else and had another family she says.

She was shaken again years later when while dating her Good Will Hunting co-star Matt Damon, she watched a television interview in which he revealed that he was dumping her. It was a “sweet love affair... but had a combustible ending" she says.