IMDb thinks I know Minnie Driver from Circle of Friends. Fair enough; goodness knows I wrote about it for this site already. I did see it back in its new release on VHS days, too. (As I recall, that’s only a few years before I taught an adult friend how to use Amazon so she could find more Maeve Binchy books!) However, the movie of hers I’ve seen most often is definitely Grosse Pointe Blank. I’m also going to argue later in this article that Debi Newberry and Benny Hogan have qualities in common, though frankly the way the movie ends Benny has less reason to develop herself than Debi has had.

Driver herself turns out to have had a bit of a soap opera childhood. Her father was an RAF pilot who received a medal in the first named air battle of World War II and was a company director. Her mother was a fabric designer and former model. They were never married, and indeed when Minnie was born, her father was married to someone else. She was born in London but grew up in Barbados; when her parents split up, she was sent to boarding school. She has multiple half-siblings, some from her father’s actual, you know, marriage. (Actually, I can’t tell if one is a full sibling or a half-sibling; I assume full, because they had a good enough relationship as children that “Minnie” is the nickname said sister gave her.) Or anyway, one from the woman he was married to when he was with her mother and two from another marriage.

Like many aspiring actors, her first appearance on TV was in a commercial, and delightfully, the Internet Archive has it. (It’s the third one in this collection.) Almost immediately, however, she was doing TV with a lot of big names. Ian McShane. Jonathan Pryce. Michael Gambon. Sure, it was an episode here or there, but still; by 1993, she was third-billed in a Jonathan Pryce miniseries. Two years later would be her breakout performance as Benny Hogan. To be sure, she’s technically miscast in the role; Minnie Driver is many things, but a plus-size Irishwoman she is not. Her performance in the role is still good enough so that you sigh and accept her at it.

So I promised you similarities between Benny and Debi. It’s not just that they are sorely mistreated by the men they trust as young women, with Jack’s cheating on Benny and Martin’s disappearing on Debi. It’s that they square their shoulders and move on. Debi may have more confidence than Benny, but in part that’s a difference of era. (It’s likely also a difference in parenting, but we don’t know enough about Debi’s parents’ parenting to say for sure.) In the book, Benny works very hard at being funny to fit in, and Debi uses her wit to protect herself in other ways, but it’s still there, a shield against what life is throwing at them. They also both want to be free to make their own life-choices regardless of circumstance.

I like Minnie Driver, and I’m pleased she appears to be in a place in her life where she’s damned well going to be having fun no matter what it does to her career. I didn’t like Phantom of the Opera much, and I’m never going to not wish they hadn’t just cast people who could both sing and act, but at least she was having fun as Carlotta even if she had to be dubbed. And her appearance as Anne Bonny on Our Flag Means Death was one of the highlights of a season full of highlights. She can doubtless afford to do as she pleases, especially given she apparently lives in what she refuses to call a trailer at the beach to give herself more time to surf. Gender-swapped Rockford Files reboot when?

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