Here's the challenge: how do you become a major movie actress? OK, maybe, like Lana Turner, you could be plucked from the obscurity of an LA diner and whisked off in a tight, white sweater to fame and fortune at MGM. But what if you're a young British actress? Not many examples there. Sure, many an English rose has tried to scale Hollywood's heights. Yet with the exception of Vivien Leigh and Julie Christie, few British actresses have been able to push their name above a big-budget title into the glory of a sole credit. Now, however, we have a strong home-grown contender for Hollywood's high table. And this actress has one vital advantage over all previous candidates: Minnie Driver has decided to be American.
'It's a con,' admits the 26-year-old Barbados-born, Hampshire-bred actress. 'But I also feel as if I'm a pioneer. Yes, there's Emma Thompson and Julia Ormond, but there was no one else going over there and passing themselves off as American. So I saw a vacuum and said to myself, 'I'm going to mark out new ground. I'm going to create a new channel to Hollywood'.' So far, this star-bound strategy has worked. A mid-Manhattan accent tricked director Barry Levinson into offering her the female lead in the de Niro-Hoffman-Pitt vehicle Sleepers - and that was despite the backroom boys' preference for Sandra Bullock. Then a quick trip across the Hudson to New Jersey nasal convinced actor-director Stanley Tucci to give her the role of Phyllis, the 'Joisey' princess who loses Tucci to Isabella Rossellini in Big Night. And now it doesn't even have to be a con, because her LA neighbour John Cusack already knew Driver was fresh 'from overseas' when he cast her as his Detroit DJ-girlfriend in this year's other American independent hit, Grosse Pointe Blank.
The woman doesn't just do American. What brought Driver to Hollywood's attention in the first place was her portrayal of Benny, the pudgy Irish country girl who loves, loses and wins pretty boy Chris O'Donnell in the saccharine 1995 movie Circle Of Friends. Driver then swiftly shed her 20lbs of character-enhancing blubber (with a little help from a unsuccessful love affair) and went on to win more raves for her tone-deaf Russian country and western singer in the last 007 instalment, Goldeneye.
Right now, however, Driver is in another timescale altogether. The diva of dialect sits perched between the narrow seats of a damp, cramped old caravan, swathed in chiffon and lace, with her pitch-black corkscrew curls scraped up into a bun. Parked in woods outside Hampton Court, she's on a break between takes for her latest film, The Governess, in which she plays a lovestruck Jewish girl, forced into disguise when she takes a job as a governess on a remote Scottish island in the early 1840s.
'We're obviously on a small budget,' Driver admits, waving her hand from wall to formica wall, 'and it's a very stark film. But at the same time, it's also very erotic in the sense that what is intimated in this girl's first love is natural and quiet. It's in that realm rather than the revelation of a beautiful Uma Thurman goddess.'
Though this leafy British interlude may sound like a major diversion off the expressway to Hollywood, The Governess is the first film to be totally dependent on a Driver performance. She has to carry almost every scene. And not only that. According to director Sandra Goldbacher, she has to play a different role with each character within the film - from church mouse to lover and to family protector.
'But Rosina is also quite modern and out of time,' says Goldbacher, 'since she goes from sexual discovery in a disastrous first love (with her employer) through to a recovery of her sense of self. So I wanted an actress who could be both vulnerable and strong. Luckily for me, Minnie is wonderful at showing a whole range of emotions.' As for Driver herself, she seems to be exhilarated by all these demands. 'I like the fact that Rosina's led through the senses. Maybe she's read too much Byron and she's full of hormones. But I also like it that she's imperfect and flawed and behaves like we all behave in late adolescence - which is to make grave mistakes that you ultimately learn from.
'But it's still enormously painful. I mean, I can remember the kick in the stomach when you see the boy you love with another girl, or when you're told he's secretly seeing someone else, or being dumped or having to dump. To me those memories seem horribly near the surface - or wonderfully near the surface.'
Maybe it's this ability to recapture feeling that makes Driver stand out on screen. Yet her own adolescence, if not completely angst-free, was remarkably light on material misery. Brought up by a financier-father in Barbados and an ex-model mother in the home counties, her background seems steeped in idyllic comfort and privilege.
She coasted on from Bedales private school to drama training at Weber Douglas and almost straight into prestigious TV hits such as Danny Boyle's Mr Wroe's Virgins, and to her most conspicuous small-screen role as the raunchy illicit love interest in the BBC's The Politician's Wife.
What Driver has developed along the way is sufficient self-confidence to recognise her personal limitations. 'If you just light me from the left or right,' she says, gesturing across her broad face, 'I look like the back end of a bus.' She's no less disparaging about her first roles - 'I don't come from the grand tradition of British theatre. I come from the grand tradition of crappy TV' - or even about what she's trying to achieve. 'I have to prove that I'm in the great tradition of whoredom, that I can be whatever they want me to be. That's the test.'
It was precisely for this reason that she refused to be the ultimate whore in Granada TV's Moll Flanders and chose instead to become a New York social worker in Barry Levinson's Sleepers. Within this stateside strategy, again and again, it is Driver's voice that is her most potent weapon. Her vocal dips and dives down New York's five boroughs, from the Bronx to Brooklyn via East Harlem, through the sing-song hoops of a Jamaican taxi-driver in Queens or from the adenoidal flatness of Roseanne Barr through to the imperious, clipped tones of a Bloomingdales fashion buyer, this vocal chameleon can even pronounce her uptown vowels clearly when she's chewing gum.
'Getting someone's accent roughly is easy,' she breezily remarks. 'The hard part is getting it to within a few miles of where they live.' Once prompted, she rushes into an explanation of exactly how to do it. 'The British accent is what I consider to be neutral. Phonetically, it's flat, but the moment you go to an American accent, the tongue tightens and your voice immediately becomes nasal - like in 'Toirty-toird Street'. So then you have to open the back of your throat again and the tone becomes deeper and more real. Then you can move from nasal New York into a more varied rhythm.' She laughs: 'It's like discovering a new toy.'
But it's a very useful toy. Director Gus Van Sant made her do four different accents when she read for his upcoming film Goodwill. 'I think it was because he heard that I did them and he wanted to have a joke at my expense.' And again she breaks into laughter as she repeats his demands: 'Do Irish, now Australian. How about western Canadian? Hey, what's that? Welsh?' But before Driver can globe-trot any further, a knock on the window stops the show, and turns her from phonetic jukebox back into 19th-century schoolmarm.
As she ducks her 5ft 10 inch frame out through the caravan doorway, Driver admits she hasn't needed much of an accent in her other upcoming role - in Christian Slater's Dollars 80 million epic The Flood - since she spends most of her time 'dunked in a 12 million gallon tank of water'.
As a parting shot, though, Driver turns to say that she has a more vocal part in the imminent comedy thriller Good Will Hunting, with Robin Williams. What's more, if the talk on the set is true, a 'big honcho' director is secretly flying in today to offer Driver a major role in an upcoming mega-movie.
Only one thought occurs as the young actress bunches up her dress to stride back on set: Driver has come a long way since her first inauspicious career move. At the age of two, her mother introduced her to Joanna Lumley, whereupon the ingenue immediately made her mark. She peed in Purdey's lap. The Governess is due to be released next summer.
The Guardian PAGE T012 Copyright (C) Guardian Newspapers Ltd, 1984-1997
